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By THOMAS CAMPBELL. 



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PUBLISHED BY WELLS AND LILLY, 

1819. 



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ESSAY 



ON 



PART I. 

1 HE influence of the Norman conquest 
upon the language of England was like that 
of a great inundation, which at first buries 
the face of the landscape under its waters, 
but which at last subsiding, leaves behind it 
the elements of new beauty and fertility. 
Its first effect was to degrade the Anglo- 
Saxon tongue to the exclusive use of the 
inferior orders; and by the transference of 
estates, ecclesiastical benefices, and civil 
dignities, to Norman possessors, to give the 
French language, which had begun to pre- 
vail at court from the time of Edward the 



4 ESSAY ON 

Confessor, a more complete predominance 
among the higher classes of society. The 
native gentry of England were either driven 
into exile, or depressed into a state of depen- 
dence on their conqueror, which habituated 
them to speak his language. On the other 
hand, we received from the Normans the 
first germs of romantic poetry ; and our lan- 
guage was ultimately indebted to them for a 
wealth and compass of expression, which it 
probably would not have otherwise possess- 
ed. 

The Anglo-Saxon, however, was not lost, 
though it was superseded by French, and 
disappeared as the language of superior life 
and of public business. It is found written 
in prose, at the end of Stephen's reign, 
nearly a century after the conquest ; and the 
Saxon Chronicle, which thus exhibits it, 
contains even a fragment of verse, professed 
to have been composed by an individual 
who had seen William the Conqueror. To 
fix upon any precise time, when the national 
speech can be said to have ceased to be 
Saxon, and begun to be English, is pro- 



ENGLISH POETRY. 5 

nounced by Dr. Johnson to be impossible. 1 
It is undoubtedly difficult, if it be possible, 
from the gradually progressive nature of lan- 
guage, as well as from the doubt, with regard 
to dates, which hangs over the small number 
of specimens of the early tongue, which we 
possess. Mr. Ellis fixes upon a period of 
about forty years, preceding the accession of 
Henry III., from 1180 to 1216, during 
which, he conceives modern English to 
have been formed. The opinions of Mr. 
Ellis, which are always delivered with can- 
dour, and almost always founded on intelli- 
gent views, are not to be lightly treated; 
and I hope I shall not appear to be either 
captious or inconsiderate in disputing them. 
But it seems to me, that he rather arbitrarily 
defines the number of years, which he sup- 
poses to have elapsed in the formation of our 
language, when he assigns forty years for 
that formation. He afterwards speaks of 
the vulgar English having suddenly super- 

1 Introduction to Johnson's Dictionary. 
1 * 



6 ESSAY ON 

seeled the pure and legitimate Saxon. 1 Now, 
if the supposed period could be fixed with 
any degree of accuracy to thirty or forty 
years, one might waive the question whether 
a transmutation occupying so much time 
could, with propriety or otherwise, be called 
a sudden one ; but when we find that there 
are no sufficient data for fixing its bounda- 
ries even to fifty years, the idea of a sudden 
transition in the language becomes inadmis- 
sible. 

The mixture of our literature and lan- 
guage with the Norman, or, in other words, 
the formation of English, commenced, ac- 
cording to Mr. Ellis, in 1180. At that pe- 
riod, he calculates that Layamon, the first 
translator from French into the native 

1 " The most striking peculiarity" (says Mr. Ellis) 
41 in the establishment of our vulgar English is, that it 
seems to have very suddenly superseded the pure and 
legitimate Saxon, from which its elements were princi- 
pally derived, instead of becoming its successor, as gene- 
rally has been supposed, by a slow and imperceptible 
progress."— Specimens of Early English Poetry, vol. ii. 
p. 404. 



ENGLISH POETRY. 7 

tongue, finished his version of Wace's 
" Brut." This translation, however, he pro- 
nounces to be still unmixed, though barba- 
rous Saxon. It is certainly not very easy 
to conceive how the sudden and distinct 
formation of English can be said to have 
commenced with unmixed Saxon; but Mr. 
Ellis, possibly, meant the period of Laya- 
mon's work to be the date after, and not at 
which the change may be understood to 
have begun. Yet, while he pronounces 
Layamon's language unmixed Saxon, he 
considers it to be such a sort of Saxon as 
required but the substitution of a few French 
for Saxon words to become English. No- 
thing more, in Mr. Ellis's opinion, was ne- 
cessary to change the old into the new 
native tongue, and to produce an exact re- 
semblance between the Saxon of the twelfth 
century, and the English of the thirteenth ; 
early in which century, according to Mr. 
Ellis, the new language was fully formed, or, 
as he afterwards more cautiously expresses 
himself, was "m its far advanced state" 
The reader will please to recollect, that the 



o ESSAY ON 

two main circumstances in the change of 
Anglo- Saxon into English, are the adoption 
of French words, and the suppression of the 
inflections of the Saxon noun and verb. 
Now, if Layamon's style exhibits a language 
needing only a few French words to be con- 
vertible into English, the Anglo-Saxon must 
have made some progress before Layamon's 
time to an English form. Whether that 
progress was made rapidly, or suddenly, we 
have not sufficient specimens of the lan- 
guage, anterior to Layamon, to determine^ 
But that the change was not sudden, but 
gradual, I conceive, is much more probably 
to be presumed. 1 

1 If Layamon's work was finished in 1180, the verses in 
the Saxon Chronicle, on the death of William the Con- 
queror, said to be written by one who had seen that mo- 
narch, cannot be considered as a specimen of the language 
immediately anterior to Layamon. But St. Godric is 
said to have died in 1170, and the verses ascribed to him 
might have been written at a time nearly preceding Lay- 
amon's work. Of St. Godric's verses a very few may be 
compared with a few of Layamon's. 

St Godric. 
Sainte Marie Christie's bur! * 
Maiden's clenhud, Modere's flur ! 



ENGLISH POETRY. 9 

Layamon, however, whether we call him 
Saxon or English, certainly exhibits a dawn 
of English. And when did this dawn ap- 
pear? Mr. Ellis computes that it was in 
1180, placing it thus late, because Wace 
took a great many years to translate his 

Dillie mine sinnen, rix in mine mod, 
Bring me to winne with selfe God. 

In English. Saint Mary, Christ's bower — Maiden's 
purity, Motherhood's flower—Destroy my sin, reign in 
my mood or mind— Bring me to dwell with the very God. 

Layamon. 

And of alle than folke 
The wuneden ther on folde, 
Wes thisses landes folk 
Leodene heudest itald ; 
And alswa the wimmen 
Wunliche on heowen. 

In English. And of all the folk that dwelt on earth 
was this land's folk the handsomest, (people told ;) and 
also the women handsome of hue. 

Here are four lines of St. Godric, in all probability 
earlier thau Layamon's; and yet does the English reader 
find Layamon at all more intelligible, or does he seem to 
make any thing like a sudden transition to English as the 
poetical successor of St. Godric ? 



10 ESSAY ON 

" Brut" from Geoffrey of Monmouth ; and be- 
cause Layamon, who translated that " Brut," 
was probably twenty-five years engaged in 
the task. But this is attempting to be pre- 
cise in dates, where there is no ground for 
precision. It is quite as easy to suppose 
that the English translator finished his work 
in ten as in twenty years; so that the 
change from Saxon to English would com- 
mence in 1265, and thus the forty years 
Exodus of our language, supposing it bound- 
ed to 1216, would extend to half a century. 
So difficult is it to fix any definite period for 
the commencing formation of English. It is 
easy to speak of a child being born at an 
express time; but the birth-epochs of lan- 
guages are not to be registered with the same 
precision and facility. Again, as to the end 
of Mr. Ellis's period : it is inferred by him, 
that the formation of the language was either 
completed or far advanced in 1216, from the 
facility of rhyming displayed in Robert of 
Gloucester, and in pieces belonging to the 
middle of the thirteenth century or perhaps 
to an earlier date. I own that, to me, this 



ENGLISH POETRY. 11 

theorizing by conjecture seems like stepping 
in quicksand. Robert of Gloucester wrote in 
1280; and surely his rhyming with facility 
then, does not prove the English language to 
have been fully formed in 1216. But we 
have pieces, it seems, which are supposed to 
have been written early in the thirteenth 
century. To give any support to Mr. El- 
lis's theory, such pieces must be proved to 
have been produced very early in the thir- 
teenth century. Their coming towards the 
middle of it, and shewing facility of rhyming 
at that late date, will prove little, or nothing. 
But of these poetical fragments supposed 
to commence either with or early in the 
thirteenth century, our antiquaries afford us 
dates which, though often confidently pro- 
nounced, are really only conjectural; and, 
in fixing those conjectural dates, they are 
by no means agreed. Warton speaks of this 
and that article being certainly not later than 
the reign of Richard 1.; but he takes no 
pains to authenticate what he affirms. He 
pronounces the love song, " Blow, blow, thou 
northern wind," to be as old as the year 



12 ESSAY ON 

1200. Mr. Ellis puts it off only to about half 
a century later. Hickes places the " Land 
of Cokayne" just after the Conquest. Mr. 
Warton would place it before the Conquest, 
if he were not deterred by the appearance of 
a few Norman words, and by the learned 
authority of Hickes. Layamon would thus 
be superseded, as quite a modern. The 
truth is, respecting the " Land of Cokayne," 
that we are left in total astonishment at the 
circumstance of men, so well informed as 
Hickes and Warton, placing it either before 
or immediately after the Conquest, as its 
language is comparatively modern. It con- 
tains allusions to pinnacles in buildings, 
which were not introduced till the reign of 
Henry III. Mr. Ellis is not so rash as to 
place that production, which Hickes and 
Warton removed to near the Conquest, ear- 
lier than the thirteenth century; and I be- 
lieve it may be placed even late in that 
century. In short, where shall we fix upon 
the first poem that is decidedly English ? 
and how shall we ascertain its date to a 
certainty within any moderate number of 



ENGLISH POETRY. 13 

years ? Instead of supposing the period of 
the formation of English to commence at 
1180, and to end at 1216, we might, without 
violence to any known fact, extend it back 
to several years earlier, and bring it down to 
a great many years later. In the fair idea of 
English we surely, in general, understand a 
considerable mixture of French words. Now, 
whatever may have been done in the twelfth 
century, with regard to that change from 
Saxon to English, which consists in the ex- 
tinction of Saxon grammatical inflections, it 
is plain that the other characteristic of En- 
glish, viz. its Gallicism, was only beginning 
in the thirteenth century. The English lan- 
guage could not be said to be saturated with 
French, till the days of Chaucer; i. e. it did 
not, till his time, receive all the French 
w r ords which it was capable of retaining. 
Mr. Ellis nevertheless tells us that the vulgar 
English, not gradually, but suddenly, super- 
seded the legitimate Saxon. When this 
sudden succession precisely began, it seems 
to be as difficult to ascertain, as when it 
ended. The sudden transition, by Mr. EI- 
2 



14 ESSAY ON 

lis's own theory, occupied about forty years ; 
and, to all appearance, that term might be 
lengthened, with respect to its commence- 
ment and continuance, to fourscore years at 
least. 

The Saxon language, we are told, had 
ceased to be poetically cultivated for some 
time previous to the Conquest. This might 
be the case with regard to lofty efforts of 
composition, but Ingulphus, the secretary of 
William the Conqueror, speaks of the popu- 
lar ballards of the English, in praise of their 
heroes, which were sung about the streets ; 
and William of Malmsbury, in the twelfth 
century, continues to make mention of them. 1 
The pretensions of these ballads to the name 
of poetry we are unhappily, from the loss of 
them, unable to estimate. For a long time 
after the Conquest, the native minstrelsy, 
though it probably was never altogether ex- 
tinct, may be supposed to have sunk to the 
lowest ebb. No human pursuit is more sen- 

1 William of Malmsbury drew much of his information 
from those Saxon ballads. 



ENGLISH POETRY. 15 

sible than poetry to national pride or mor- 
tification, and a race of peasants, like the 
Saxons, struggling for bare subsistence, 
under all the dependence, and without the 
protection, of the feudal system, were in a 
state the most ungenial to feelings of poeti- 
cal enthusiasm. For more than one century 
after the Conquest, as we are informed, an 
Englishman was a term of contempt. So 
much has time altered the associations at- 
tached to a name, which we should now 
employ as the first appeal to the pride or in- 
trepidity of those who bear it. By degrees, 
however, the Norman and native races be- 
gan to coalesce, and their patriotism and 
political interests to be identified. The 
crown and aristocracy having become during 
their struggles, to a certain degree, candi- 
dates for the favour of the people, and rivals 
in affording them protection, free burghs and 
chartered corporations were increased, and 
commerce and social intercourse began to 
quicken. Mr. Ellis alludes to an Anglo- 
Norman jargon having been spoken in com- 
mercial intercourse, from which he conceives 



16 ESSAY ON 

our synonynies to have been derived. That 
individuals, imperfectly understanding each 
other, might accidentally speak a broken 
jargon, may be easily conceived ; but that 
such a lingua Franca was ever the distinct 
dialect, even of a mercantile class, Mr. Ellis 
proves neither by specimens nor historical 
evidence. The synonymes in our language 
may certainly be accounted for by the gra- 
dual entrance of French words, without sup- 
posing an intermediate jargon. The national 
speech, it is true, received a vast influx of 
French words ; but it received them by de- 
grees, and subdued them, as they came in» 
to its own idioms and grammar. 

Yet, difficult as it may be to pronounce 
precisely when Saxon can be said to have 
ceased and English to have begun, it must 
be supposed that the progress and improve- 
ment of the national speech was most con- 
siderable at those epochs, which tended to 
restore the importance of the people. The 
hypothesis of a sudden transmutation of Sax- 
on into English appears, on the whole, not 
to be distinctly made out. At the same 



ENGLISH POETRY. If 

time, some public events might be highly 
favourable to the progress and cultivation of 
the language. Of those events, the estab- 
lishment of municipal governments and of 
elective magistrates in the towns, must have 
been very important, a3 they furnished mate- 
rials and incentives for daily discussion and 
popular eloquence. As property and secu- 
rity increased among the people, we may 
also suppose the native minstrelsy to have 
revived. The minstrels, or those who wrote 
for them, translated or imitated Norman 
romances; and, in so doing, enriched the 
language with many new words, which they 
borrowed from the originals, either from 
want of corresponding terms in their own 
vocabulary, or from the words appearing to 
be more agreeable. Thus, in a general 
view, we may say that, amidst the early 
growth of her commerce, literature, and civi- 
lization, England acquired the new form of 
her language, which was destined to carry 
to the ends of the earth the blessings from 
which it sprung. 

2 * 



18 ESSAY ON 

In the formation of English from its Saxon 
and Norman materials, the genius of the 
native tongue might he said to prevail, as it 
subdued to Saxon grammar and construction 
the numerous French words, which found 
their way into the language. 1 But it was 
otherwise with respect to our poetry — in 
which, after the Conquest, the Norman muse 
must be regarded as the earliest preceptress 
of our own. Mr. Tyrwhitt has even said, 
and his opinion seems to be generally adopt- 
ed, that we are indebted for the use of 
rhyme, and for ail the forms of our versifica- 
tion, entirely to the Normans. 2 Whatever 

1 Vide Tyrwhitfs preface to the Canterbury Tales,, 
where a distinct account is given of the grammatical 
changes exhibited in the rise and progress of English. 

2 It is likely that the Normans would have taught us 
the use of rhyme and their own metres, whether these 
had been known or not to the Anglo-Saxons before the 
Conquest. But respecting Mr. Tyrwhitt's position, that 
we owe all our forms of verse, and the use of rhyme, 
entirely to the Normans, T trust the reader will pardon me 
for introducing a mere doubt on a subject which cannot be 
interesting to many. With respect to rhyme, I might 
lay some stress on the authority of Mr. Turner, who, in 



ENGLISH POETRY. 19 

tnight be the case with regard to our forms 
of versification, the chief employment of our 

his History of the Anglo-Saxons, says that the Anglo- 
Saxon versification possessed occasional rhyme ; but as he 
admits that rhyme formed no part of its> constituent cha- 
racter, for fear of assuming too much, let it be admitted 
that we have no extant specimens of rhyme in our lan- 
guage before the Conquest. One stanza of a ballad shall 
indeed be mentioned, as an exception to this, which may 
be admitted or rejected at the reader's pleasure. In the 
mean time let it be recollected, that if we have not rhyme 
iu the vernacular verse, we have examples of it in the 
poetry of the Anglo-Saxon churchmen— abundance of it in 
Bede's and Boniface's Latin verses. We meet also, in the 
same writers, with lines which resemble modern verse in 
their trochaic and iambic structure, considering that struc- 
ture not as classical but accentual metre. — Take, for ex- 
ample, these verses : 

" Quando Christus Deus noster 

Natus est ex Virgine — " 

which go precisely in the same cadence with such modern 
trochaics as 

" Would you hear how once repining 
Great Eliza captive lay." 

And we have many such lines as these: 

" Ut floreas cum domino 

In sempiterno solio 

Qua Martyres in cuneo," &c. 



20 ESSAY ON 

earliest versifiers certainly was to transplant 
the fictions of the Norman school, and to 
naturalize them in our language. 

which flow exactly like the lines in IV Allegro : 

" The Mountain Nymph, sweet Liberty. 
* * . * * ) ' * ^ * 
"And pomp, and feast, and revelry, 
With masque, and antique pageantry." 

Those Latin lines are, in fact, a prototype of our own 
eight syllable iambic. It is singular that rhyme and such 
metres as the above, which are generally supposed to 
have come into the other modern languages from the 
Latin rhymes of the church, should not have found their 
way from thence into the Anglo-Saxon vernacular verse, 
But they certainly did not, we shall be told; for there is 
no appearance of them in the specimens of Anglo-Saxon 
verse, before the Conquest. Of such specimens, however, 
it is not pretended that we have any thing like a full or 
regular series. On the contrary, many Saxon ballads, 
which have been alluded to by Anglo-Norman writers as 
of considerable antiquity, have been lost with the very 
names of their composers. And from a few articles saved 
in such a wreck, can we pronounce confidently on the 
whole contents of the cargo? The following solitary 
stanza, however, has been preserved, from a ballad attri- 
buted to Canute the Great. 

" Merry sungen the Muneches binnen Ely, 
The Cnut Ching reiither by, 



ENGLISH POETRY. 21 

The most liberal patronage was afforded 
to Norman minstrelsy in England by the 

Roweth Cnites noer the land, 
And here we thes Muniches sang." 

" Merry sang the Monks in Ely, 
When Canute King was sailing by : 
Row, ye knights, near the land, 
And let us hear these Monks' song." 

There is something very like rhyme in the Anglo- 
Saxon stanza. I have no doubt that Canute heard the 
monks singing Latin rhymes ; and I have some suspicion 
that he finished his Saxon ballad in rhyme also. Thomas 
of Ely, who knew the whole song, translates his specimen 
of it in Latin lines, which, whether by accident or design, 
rhyme to each other. The genius of the ancient Anglo- 
Saxon poetry, Mr. Turner observes, was obscure, peri- 
phrastical, and elliptical ; but, according to that writer's 
conjecture, a new and humble but perspicuous style of 
poetry was introduced at a later time, in the shape of the 
narrative ballad. In this plainer style we may conceive 
the possibility of rhyme having found a place ; because 
the verse would stand in need of that ornament to distin- 
guish it from prose, more than in the elliptical and in- 
verted manner. With regard to our anapaestic measure, 
or triple-time verse, Dr. Percy has shewn that its rudi- 
ments can be traced to Scaldic poetry. It is often found 
very distinct in Langlande ; and that species of verse, at 
least, I conceive, is not necessarily to be referred to a 
Norman origin. 



22 ESSAY ON 

first kings of the new dynasty. This en- 
couragement, and the consequent cultivation 
of the northern dialect of French, gave it so 
much the superiority over the southern or 
troubadour dialect, that the French language, 
according to the acknowledgment of its best 
informed antiquaries, received from England 
and Normandy, the first of its works which 
deserve to be cited. The Norman trou- 
veurs, it is allowed, were more eminent nar- 
rative poets than the Provencal troubadours. 
No people had a better right to be the foun- 
ders of chivalrous poetry than the Normans. 
They were the most energetic generation of 
modern men. Their leader, by the con- 
quest of England in the eleventh century, 
consolidated the feudal system upon a broader 
basis than it ever had before possessed. Be- 
fore the end of the same century, Chivalry 
rose to its full growth as an institution, by 
the circumstance of martial zeal being en- 
listed under the banners of superstition. 
The crusades, though they certainly did not 
give birth to jousts and tournaments, must 
have imparted to them a new spirit and 



ENGLISH POETRY. 23 

interest, as the preparatory images of a con- 
secrated warfare. And those spectacles 
constituted a source of description to the 
romancers, to which no exact counterpart is 
to be found in the heroic poetry of antiquity. 
But the growth of what may properly be 
called romantic poetry, was not instanta- 
neous after the Conquest ; and it was not till 
"English Richard ploughed the deep," that 
the crusaders seem to have found a place 
among the heroes of romance. Till the 
middle of the twelfth century, or possibl}^ 
later, no work of professed fiction, or bearing 
any semblance to epic fable, can be traced 
in Norman verse — nothing but songs, satires, 
chronicles, or didactic works, to all of which 
however, the name of romance, derived from 
the Roman descent of the French tongue, 
was applied in the early and wide accepta- 
tion of the word. To these succeeded the 
genuine metrical romance, which, though 
often rhapsodical and desultory, had still 
invention, ingenuity, and design, sufficient 
to distinguish it from the dry and dreary 
chronicle. The reign of French metrical 



24 ESSAY ON 

romance may be chiefly assigned to the lat- 
ter part of the twelfth, and the whole of the 
thirteenth century ; that of English metrical 
romance, to the latter part of the thirteenth, 
and the whole of the fourteenth 1 century. 
Those ages of chivalrous song were, in the 
mean time, fraught with events which, while 
they undermined the feudal system, gradu- 
ally prepared the way for the decline of 
chivalry itself. Literature and science were 
commencing, and even in the improvement 
of the mechanical skill, employed to heighten 
chivalrous or superstitious magnificence, the 
seeds of arts, industry, and plebeian inde- 
pendence were unconsciously sown. One 
invention, that of gua-powder, is eminently 
marked out, as the cause of the extinction 
of Chivalry; but even if that invention had 
not taken place, it may well be conjectured 
that the contrivance of other means of mis- 
sile destruction in war, and the improvement 
of tactics, would have narrowed that scope 

1 The practice of translating French rhyming romances 
into English verse, however, continued down to the reign 
of Henry VII. 



ENGLISH POETRY. 25 

for the prominence of individual prowess, 
which was necessary for the chivalrous cha- 
racter, and that the progress of civilization 
must have ultimately levelled its romantic 
consequence. But to anticipate the remote 
effects of such causes, if scarcely within the 
ken of philosophy, was still less within the 
reach of poetry. Chivalry was still in all 
its glory ; and to the eye of the poet appear- 
ed as likely as ever to be immortal. The 
progress of civilization even ministered to 
its external importance. The early arts 
made chivalrous life, with all its pomp and 
ceremonies, more august and imposing, and 
more picturesque as a subject for description. 
Literature, for a time, contributed to the 
same effect, by her jejune and fabulous 
efforts at history, in which the athletic wor- 
thies of classical story and of modern ro- 
mance were gravely connected by an ideal 
genealogy. 1 Thus the dawn of human im- 

1 Geoffrey of Monmouth's history, of which the modern 

opinion seems to be, that it was not a forgery, but derived 

from an Armorican original, and the pseudo-Turpin's Life 

of Charlemagne, were the grand historical magazines of 

3 



26 ESSAY CL\ 

provement smiled on the fabric which it was 
ultimately to destroy, as the morning sun 
gilds and beautifies those masses of frost- 
work, which are to melt before its noonday 
heat. 

The elements of romantic fiction have 
been traced up to various sources ; but 
neither the Scaldic, nor Saracenic, nor 
Armorican theory of its origin can suffi- 
ciently account for all its materials. Many 
of them classical, and others derived from 
the scriptures. The migrations of science 
are difficult enough to be traced; but Fic- 

the romancers. Popular songs about Arthur and Charle- 
magne, (or, as some will have it, Charles Marlel), were 
probably the main sources of Turpin's forgery and of 
Geoffrey's Armorican book. Even the proverbial menda- 
city of the pseudo-Turpin must have been indebted for 
the leading hints to songs that were extant respecting 
Charlemagne. The stream of fiction having thus spread 
itself in those grand prose reservoirs, afterwards flowed 
out from thence again in the shape of verse, with a force 
renewed by accumulation. Once more, as if destined to 
alternations, romance, after the fourteenth century, return- 
ed to the shape of prose, and in many instances made and 
carried pretensions to the sober credibility of history. 



ENGLISH POETRY. 27 

don travels on still lighter wings, and scat- 
ters the seeds of her wild flowers impercep- 
tibly over the world till they surprise us by 
springing up with similarity in regions the 
most remotely divided. There was a vague 
and unselecting love of the marvellous in 
romance, which sought for adventures, like 
its knights errant, in every quarter where 
they could be found ; so that it is easier to 
admit of all the sources which are imputed 
to that species of fiction, than to limit our 
belief to any one of them. 
Norman verse dwelt for a considerableTweifth 

. century. 

time in the tedious historic style, before 
it reached the shape of amusing fable ; and 
we find the earliest efforts of the native 
Muse confined to translating Norman verse, 
while it still retained its uninviting form 
of the chronicle. The first of the Nor- 
man poets, from whom any versifier in the 
language is known to have translated, was 
Wace, a native of Jersey, born in the reign 
of Henry II. In the year 1155, Wace fin- 
ished his " Brut d'Angleterre," which is a 
French version of Geoffrey of Monmouth's 



28 ESSAY ON 

V 

History of Great Britain, deduced from Bru- 
tus to Cadwallader, in 689. Layamon a 
priest of Ernesley upon Severn, translated 
Wace's Metrical Chronicle into the verse of 
the popular tongue ; and notwithstanding Mr. 
Ellis's date of 1180, may be supposed, with 
equal probability, to have produced his work 
within ten or fifteen years after the middle 
of the twelfth century. Layamon's transla- 
tion may be considered as the earliest speci- 
men of metre in the native language, poste- 
rior to the Conquest ; except some lines in 
the Saxon Chronicle on the death of Wil- 
liam I. and a few religious rhymes, which, 
A according to Matthew Paris, the Blessed 
Virgin was pleased to dictate to St. Godric, 
the hermit, near Durham ; unless we add to 
these the specimen of Saxon poetry pub- 
lished in the Archaeologia by Mr. Cony- 
beare, who supposes that composition to be 
posterior to the Conquest, and to be the last 
expiring voice of the Saxon Muse. 1 Of the 

1 Two specimens of the ancient state of the language, 
viz. the stanzas on old age, beginning " He may him sore 



ENGLISH POETRY. 29 

dialect of Layamon, Mr. Mitford, in bis Har- 
mony of Languages, observes, that it has all 
the appearance of a language thrown into 
confusion by the circumstances of those who 
spoke it. It is truly neither Saxon nor 
English. Mr. Ellis's opinion of its being 
simple Saxon has been already noticed. So 
little agreed are the most ingenious specu- 
lative men on the characteristics of style, 
which they shall entitle Saxon or English. 
We may, however, on the whole, consider 
the style of Layamon to be as nearly the 
intermediate state of the old and new lan- 
guages, as can be found in any ancient spe- 
cimen : something like the new insect 

stirring its wings, before it has shaken off 
the aurelia state. But of this work, or of 
any specimen supposed to be written in the 
early part of the thirteenth century, display- 
ing a sudden transition from Saxon to Eng- 
lish, I am disposed to repeat my doubts. 

• 

adreden," and the quotation from the Ormulum, which 
Dr. Johnson placed, on the authority of Hickes, nearly 
after the Conquest, are considered by Mr. Tyrwhitt to 
be of a later date than Layamon's translation. Their 
language is certainly more modern. 

3* 



30 ESSAY ON 

Thirteenth Without being over credulous about the 

century. \ ° 

antiquity of the Lives of the Saints, and the 
other fragments of the thirteenth century, 
which Mr. Ellis places in chronological suc- 
cession next to Layamon, we may allow 
that before the date of Robert of Glouces- 
ter, not only the legendary and devout style, 
but the amatory and satirical, had begun to 
be rudely cultivated in the language. It 
was customary, in that age, to make the 
minstrels sing devotional strains to the harp, 
on Sundays, for the edification of the people, 
instead of the verses on gayer subjects, 
which were sung at public entertainments ; 
a circumstance which, while it indicates the 
usual care of the Catholic church to make 
use of every hold over the popular mind, 
discovers also the fondness of the people for 
their poetry, and the attractions which it 
had already begun to assume. Of the sati- 
rical style I have already alluded to one 
example in the " Land of Cokayne," an al- 
legorical satire on the luxury of the church, 
couched under the description of an imagi- 
nary paradise, in which the nuns are repre- 



ENGLISH POETRY. 31 

sented as houris, and the black and grey- 
monks as their paramours. This piece has 
humour, though not of the most delicate 
kind ; and the language is easy and fluent, 
but it possesses nothing of style, sentiment, 
or imagery, approaching to poetry. Ano- 
ther specimen of the pleasantry of the times 
is more valuable ; because it exhibits the 
state of party feeling on real events, as well 
as the state of the language at a precise 
time. 1 It is a ballad, entitled " Richard of 
Almaigne," composed by one of the adhe- 
rents of Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leices- 
ter, after the defeat of the royal party at the 
battle of Lewes, in 1264. In the year after 
that battle the royal cause was restored, and 
the Earl of Warren and Sir Hugh Bigod 
returned from exile, and assisted in the 
king's victory. In this satirical ballad, those 

1 " Though some make slight of libels," say3 Selden, 
" yet you may see by them how the wind sits ; as, take a 
straw, and throw it up into the air, you shall see by that 
which way the wind is, which you shall not do by casting 
tip a stone. More solid things do not shew the com- 
plexion of the times, so well ae; ballads and iibds." 



32 ESSAY OIV 

two personages are threatened with death, 
if they ever fall into the hands of their ene- 
mies. Such a song and such threats must 
have been composed by Leicester's party in 
the moment of their triumph, and not after 
their defeat and dispersion ; so that the date 
of the piece is ascertained by its contents. 
This political satire leads me to mention 
another, which the industrious Ritson pub- 
lished, 1 and which, without violent anachro- 
nism, may be spoken of among the specimens 
of the thirteenth century ; as it must have 
been composed within a few years after its 
close, and relates to events within its verge. 
It is a ballad on the execution of the Scot- 
tish patriots, Sir William Wallace and Sir 
Simon Fraser. The diction is as barbarous 
as we should expect from a song of triumph 
on such a subject. It relates the death and 
treatment of Wallace very minutely. The 
circumstance of his being covered with a 
mock crown of laurel in Westminster-hall, 
which Stowe repeats, is there mention- 

1 Ritson's Ancient Songs. 



ENGLISH POETRY. 33 

ed; and that of his legs being^fastened with 
iron fetters " under his horses wombe" is 
told with savage exultation. The piece was 
probably endited in the very year of the 
political murders which it celebrates : cer- 
tainly before 1314, as it mentions the skulk- 
ing of Robert Bruce, which, after the battle 
of Bannockburn, must have become a jest 
out of season. 

A few love-songs of that early period 
have been preserved, which are not wholly 
destitute of beauty and feeling. Their ex- 
pression, indeed, is often quaint, and loaded 
with alliteration; yet it is impossible to 
look without a pleasing interest upon strains 
of tenderness which carry us back to so re- 
mote an age, and which disclose to us the 
softest emotions of the human mind, in 
times abounding with such opposite traits 
of historical recollection. Such a stanza 
as the following 1 would not disgrace the lyric 
poetry of a refined age. 

1 It is here stript of its antiquated spelling. 



34 ESSAY ON 

For her love I cark and care, 
For her love I droop and dare j 
For her love my bliss is bare, 

And all I wax wan. 
For her love in sleep I slake 1 , 
For her love all night I wake ; 
For her love mourning I make 

More than any man. 

In another pastoral strain the lover says . 

When the nightingale singes the woods waxen green ; 
Leaf, grass, and blossom, springs in Avrii, I ween : 
And love is to my heart gone with one spear so keen, 
Night and day my blood it drinks — my heart doth me 
teen. 

Robert, a monk of Gloucester, whose sur- 
name is unknown, is supposed to have fin- 
ished his Rhyming Chronicle about the 
year 1280. He translated the Legends of 
Geoffrey of Monmouth, and continued the 
History of England down to the time of Ed- 
ward I., in the beginning of whose reign 
he died. The topographical, as well as 
narrative, minuteness of his Chronicle has 
made it a valuable anthority to antiquaries ; 

1 1 am deprived of sleep. 



ENGLISH POETRY. 35 

and as such it was consulted by Selden- 
when he wrote his Notes to Drayton's Poly, 
olbion. After observing some traits of hu- 
mour and sentiment, moderate as they may 
be, in compositions as old as the middle of 
the thirteenth century, we might naturally 
expect to find in Robert of Gloucester not 
indeed a decidedly poetical manner, but 
some approach to the animation of poetry. 
But the Chronicle of this English Ennius, 
as he has been called, whatever progress in 
the state of the language it may display, 
comes in reality nothing nearer the charac- 
ter of a work of imagination than Laya- 
mon's version of Wace, which preceded it 
by a hundred years, One would not ima- 
gine, from Robert of Gloucester's style, that 
he belonged to a period when a single effu- 
sion of sentiment, or a trait of humour and 
vivacity, had appeared in the language. 
On the contrary, he seems to take us back 
to the nonage of poetry, when verse is 
employed not to harmonize and beautify 
expression, but merely to assist the memo- 
ry. Were we to judge of Robert of GIou- 



36 ESSAY ON 

cester not as a chronicler, but as a candidate 
for the honours of fancy, we might he tempt- 
ed to wonder at the frigidity with which he 
dwells, as (he first possessor of such poeti- 
cal ground, on the history of Lear, of Ar- 
thur, and Merlin ; and with which he de- 
scribes a scene so susceptible of poetical 
effect, as the irruption of the first crusaders 
into Asia, preceded by the sword of fire 
which hung in the firmament, and guided 
them eastward in their path. But, in jus- 
tice to the ancient versifier, we should re- 
member, that he had still only a rude lan- 
guage to employ — the speech of boors and 
burghers, which, though it might possess a 
few songs and satires, could afford him no 
models of heroic narration. In such an 
age, the first occupant passes uninspired 
over subjects, which might kindle the high- 
est enthusiasm in the poet of a riper pe- 
riod; as the savage treads unconsciously, 
in his deserts, over mines of incalculable 
value, without sagacity to discover, or im- 
plements to explore them. In reality, his 
object was but to be historical. The high- 



ENGLISH POETRY. 37 

er orders of society still made use of French; 
and scholars wrote in that language or in 
Latin. His Chronicle was therefore recit- 
ed to a class of his contemporaries, to whom 
it must have been highly acceptable, as a 
history of their native country believed to 
be authentic, and composed in their native 
tongue. To the fabulous legends of antiqui- 
ty he added a record of more recent events, 
with some of which he was contemporary. 
As a relater of events, he is tolerably suc- 
cinct and perspicuous; and wherever the 
fact is of any importance, he shews a watch- 
ful attention to keep the reader's memory 
distinct with regard to chronology, by mak- 
ing the date of the year rhyme to something 
prominent in the narration of the fact. 

Our first known versifier of the fourteenth Fourteenth 
century is Robert, commonly called de 06 "*" 7, 
Brunne. He was born (according to his 
editor Hearne) at Malton, in Yorkshire; 
lived for some time in the house of Sixhill, 
a Gilberiine monastery in Yorkshire; and 
afterwards became a member of Brunne, or 
Browne, a priory of black canons in the 

4 



38 ESSAY ON 

same county. His real surname was Man- 
nyng; but the writers of history in those 
times (as Hearne observes) were generally 
the religious, and when they became cele- 
brated, they were designated by the names 
of religious houses to which they belonged. 
Thus, William of Malmsbury, Matthew of 
Westminster, and John of Glastonbury, re- 
ceived those appellations from their respec- 
tive monasteries. De Brunne was, as far 
as we know, only a translator. His princi- 
pal performance is a Rhyming Chronicle of 
the History of England, in tw r o parts, com- 
piled from the works of Wace and Peter 
de Langtoft. 1 The declared object of his 
work is " Not for the lerid (learned) but 
for the lewed (the low). 

1 Peter de Langtoft was a canon of Bridlington, in 
Yorkshire, of Norman origin, but born in England. He 
wrote an entire History of England in French rhymes, 
down to the end of the reign of Edward I.— Robert de 
Brunne, in his Chronicle, follows Wace in the earlier part 
of his history, but translates the latter part of it from 
Langtoft. 



ENGLISH POETRY. 39 

*' For tho 1 that in this land wonn 2 , 
44 That the latyn no 3 Frankys 4 conn 5 ." 

He seems to reckon, however, if not on the 
attention of the " lerid," at least on that of 
a class above the " lewed," as he begins his 
address to " Lordynges that be now here." 
He declares also that his verse was con- 
structed simply, being intended neither for 
seggers (reciters), nor harpours (harpers). 
Yet it is clear from another passage, that 
he intended his Chronicle to be sung, at 
least by parts, at public festivals. In the 
present day it would require considerable 
vocal powers to make so dry a recital of 
facts, as that of De Brunne's work, enter- 
taining to an audience ; but it appears that 
he could offer one of the most ancient apo- 
logies of authorship, namely, " the request 
of friends" — for he says, 

" Men besoght me many a time 
M To torn it bot in light rhyme." 

His Chronicle, it seems, was likely to be 

* Those.— 2 live- — 3 nor.— 4 French.— 5 know. 



40 ESSAY ON 

an acceptable work to social parties, assem- 
bled 

11 For to haf solace and gamen 1 

** In fellawship when they sit samen 2 ." 

In rude states of society, verse is attach- 
ed to many subjects from which it is after- 
wards divorced by the progress of literature ; 
and primitive poetry is found to be the or- 
gan not only of history, but of science, 3 the- 
logy, and of law itself. The ancient laws 
of the Athenians were sung at their public 
banquets. Even in modern times, and with- 
in the last century, the laws of Sweden were 
published in verse. 

De Brunne's versification, throughout the 
body of the work, is sometimes the entire 

1 Game. — 2 Together. 
3 Virgil, when he carries us back to very ancient man- 
ners, in the picture of Dido's feast, appropriately makes 
astronomy the first subject with which the bard Iopas en- 
tertains bis audience. 

Cithara crinitus Iopas 
Personat aurata, docuit quae maximus Atlas ; 
Hie canit errantem lunam, solisque labores. 

iENElD I. 



ENGLISH POETRY. 41 

Alexandrine, rhyming in couplets ; but for 
the most part it is only the halt" Alexandrine, 
with alternate rhymes. He thus affords a 
ballad metre, which seems to justify the 
conjecture of Hearne, that our most ancient 
ballads were only fragments of metrical his- 
tories. By this time (for the date of De 
Brunne's Chronicle brings us down to the 
year 1339") our popular ballads must have 
long added the redoubted names of Randle 
of Chester, and Robin Hood, to their list of 
native subjects. Both of these worthies had 
died before the middle of the preceding cen- 
tury, and, in the course of the next 100 
years, their names became so popular in 
English song, that Langlande, in the four- 
teenth century, makes it part of the confes- 
sion of a sluggard, that he was unable to 
repeat his paternoster, though he knew plen- 
ty of rhymes about Randle of Chester and 
Robin Hood. None of the extant ballads 

1 Robert de Brunne, it appears, from iuternal evidence, 
finished his Chronicle in May of that year — Ritson's 

MlKOT. XIII. 

4 * 



42 ESSAY ON 

about Robin Hood are, however, of any 
great antiquity? 

The style of Robert de Brunne is less 
marked by Saxonisms than that of Robert 
of Gloucester ; and though he can scarcely 
be said to come nearer the character of a 
true poet than his predecessor, he is certain- 
ly a smoother versifier, and evinces more 
facility in rhyming. It is amusing to find 
his editor, Hearne, so anxious to defend the 
moral memory of a writer, respecting whom 
not a circumstance is known, beyond the 
date of his works, and the names of the 
monasteries where he w r ore his cowl. From 
his willingness to favour the people with 
historic rhymes for their " fellawship and 
gamen," Hearne infers that he must have 
been of a jocular temper. It seems, how- 
ever, that the priory of Sixhill, where he 
lived for some time, was a house which con- 
sisted of women as well as men, a disco- 
very which alarms the good antiquary for 
the fame of his author's personal purity. 
Can we therefore think, continues Hearne, 
"that since he was of a jocular temper, he 



ENGLISH POETRV. 43 

could be wholly free from vice, or that he 
should not sometimes express himself loose- 
ly to the sisters of that place ? This objec- 
tion (he gravely continues) would have had 
some weight, had the priory of Sixhill been 
any way noted for luxury or lewdness ; but 
whereas every member of it, both men and 
women, were very chaste, we ought by no 
means to suppose that Robert of Brunne be- 
haved himself otherwise than become a good 
Christian, during his whole abode there." 
This conclusive reasoning, it may be hoped, 
will entirely set at rest any idle suspicions 
that may have crept into the reader's mind, 
respecting the chastity of Robert de Brunne. 
It may be added, that his writings betray 
not the least symptom of his having been 
either an Abelard among priests, or an Ovid 
among poets. 

Considerably before the date of Robert de 
Brunne's Chronicle, as we learn from De 
Brunne himself, the English minstrels, or 
those who wrote for them, had imitated from 
the French many compositions more poetical 
than those historical canticles, namely, ge- 



44 #■ ESSAY ON 

f 

nuine romances. In most of those metrical 
stories, irregular and shapeless as they were, 
if we compare them with the symmetrical 
structure of epic fable, there was still some 
portion of interest, and a catastrophe brought 
about, after various obstacles and difficulties, 
by an agreeable surprise. The names of 
the writers of our early English romances 
have not, except in one or two instances, 
been even conjectured, nor have the dates 
of the majority of them been ascertained, 
with any thing like precision. But in a 
general view, the era of English metrical 
romance may be said to have commenced 
towards the end of the thirteenth century. 
Warton, indeed, would place the commence- 
ment of our romance poetry considerably 
earlier; but Ritson challenges a proof of any 
English romance being known or mentioned, 
before the close of Edward I.'s reign, about 
which time, that is, the end of the thirteenth 
century, he conjectures that the romance of 
Hornchild may have been composed. It 
would be pleasing, if it were possible, to ex- 
tend the claims of English genius in this de- 



ENGLISH POETRY. 45 

partment, to any considerable number of 
original pieces. But Englisb romance po- 
etry having grown out of that of France, 
seems never to have improved upon its ori- 
ginal, or, rather, it may be allowed to have 
fallen beneath it. As to the originality of 
old English poems of this kind, we meet, in 
some of them, with heroes, whose Saxon 
names might lead us to suppose them indige- 
nous fictions, which had not come into the 
language through a French medium. Seve- 
ral old Saxon ballads are alluded to, as ex- 
tant long after the Conquest, by the Anglo- 
Norman historians, who drew from them 
many facts and inferences; and there is no 
saying how many of these ballads might 
be recast into a romantic shape by the com* 
posers for the native minstrelsy. But, on 
the other hand, the Anglo-Normans appear 
to have been more inquisitive into Saxon 
legends than the Saxons themselves; and 
their Muse was by no means so illiberal as 
to object to a hero, because he was not of 
their own generation. In point of fact, what- 
ever maybe alleged about the minstrels of 



46 ESSAY ON 

the North Country, it is difficult, if it be 
possible, to find an English romance which 
contains no internal allusion to a French 
prototype. Ritson very grudgingly allows, 
that three old stories may be called original 
English romances, until a Norman original 
shall be found for them ; l while Mr. Tyrwhitt 

1 Those are, " The Squire of Low Degree," " Sir Try- 
amour," and u Sir Eglaiuour." Respecting two of those, 
Mr. Ellis shews, that Ritson might have spared himself 
the trouble of making any concession, as the antiquity of 
The Squire of Low Degree remains to be proved, it being 
mentioned by no writer before the sixteenth century, and 
not being known to be extant in any ancient MS. Sir 
Eglamour contains allusions to its Norman pedigree. 

The difficulty of finding an original South British ro- 
mance of this period, unborrowed from a French original, 
seems to remain undisputed : but Mr. Walter Scott, in his 
edition of " Sir Tristrem," has presented the public with 
an ancient Scottish romance, which, according to Mr. 
Scott's theory, would demonstrate the English language 
to have been cultivated earlier in Scotland than in En- 
gland. In a different part of these Selections, vol. I. p. 
67, I have expressed myself in terms of more unqualified 
assent to the supposition of Thomas of Erceldoun having 
been an original romancer, than 1 should be inclined to 
use upon mature consideration. Robert de Brunne cer- 
tainly alludes to Sir Tristrem, as " the most famous of all 



ENGLISH POETRY. AT 

conceives, that we have not one English 
romance anterior to Chaucer, which is not 
borrowed from a French one. 

gests" in his time. He mentions Erceldoun, its author, 
and another poet of the name of Kendale. Of Kendale, 
whether he was Scotch or English, nothing seems to be 
known with certainty. With respect to Thomas of Ercel- 
doun, or Thomas the Rhymer, the Auchinleck MS. pub- 
lished by my illustrious friend, professes to be the work 
not of Erceldoun himself, but of some minstrel or reciter 
who had heard the story from Thomas. Its language is 
confessed to be that of the fourteenth century, and the 
MS. is not pretended to be less than eighty years older 
than the supposed date of Thomas of Erceldoun's ro- 
mance. Accordingly, whatever Thomas the Rhymer's 
production might be, this Auchinleck MS. is not a tran- 
script of it, but the transcript of the composition of some 
one, who heard the story from Thomas of Erceldoun. It 
is a specimen of Scottish poetry not in the thirteenth, but 
the fourteenth century. How much of the matter or 
manner of Thomas the Rhymer was detained by his 
deputy reciter of the story, eighty years after the assumed 
date of Thomas's work, is a subject of mere conjecture. 

Still, however, the fame of Erceldoun and Thotrem 
remain attested by Robert de Brunne : and Mr. Scott's 
doctrine is, that Thomas the Rhymer having picked up 
the chief materials of his romantic history of Sir Tristrem, 
from British traditions surviving on the border, was not a 
translator from the French, but an original authority to 



48 ESSAY ON 

In the reign of Edward II. Adam Davie, 
who was marshal of Stratford-Ie-Bow, near 
London, wrote " Visions in Verse," which 

the continental romancers. It is nevertheless acknow- 
ledged, that the story of Sir Tristrem had been told in 
French, and was familiar to the romancers of that lan- 
guage, long before Thomas the Rhymer could have set 
about picking up British traditions on the border, and in 
all probability before he was born. The possibility, there- 
fore, of his having heard the story in Norman minstrelsy, 
is put beyond the reach of denial. On the other hand, 
Mr. Scott argues, that the Scottish bard must have been 
an authority to the continental romancers, from two cir- 
cumstances. In the first place, there are two metrical 
fragments of French romance preserved in the library of 
Mr. Douce, which, according to Mr. Scott, tell the story 
of Sir Tristrem in a manner corresponding with the same 
tale as it is told by Thomas of Erceldoun, and in which a 
Inference is made to the authority of a Thomas. But the 
whole force of this argument evidently depends on the 
supposition of Mr. Douce's fragments being the work of 
one and the same author — whereas they are not to all 
appearance by the same author. A single perusal will 
enable us to observe how remarkably they differ in style. 
They have no appearance of being parts of the same 
story, one of them placing the court of King Mark at 
Tintagil, the other at London. Only one of the fragments 
refers to the authority of a Thomas, and the style of that 
one bears very strong marks of being French of the twelfth 



ENGLISH POETRY. 49 

appear to be original; and the " Battle of 
Jerusalem," in which be turned into rhyme 
the contents of a French prose romance. 1 

century a date which would place it beyond the possibility 
of its referring to Thomas of Erceldoun. The second of 
NIt. Scott's proofs of the originality of the Scottish Ro- 
mance is, that Gotfried, of Strasburg, in a German romance, 
written about the middle of the thirteenth century, refers to 
Thomas of Britannia as his original. Thomas of Britan- 
nia is, however, a vague word ; and among the Anglo- 
Norman poels there might be one named Thomas, who 
might have told a story which was confessedly told in 
many shapes in the French language, and which was 
known in France before the Rhymer could have flourish- 
ed j and to this Anglo-Norman Thomas, Gotfried might 
refer. Eichorn, the German editor, says, that Gotfried 
translated his romance from the Norman French. Mr. 
Scott, in his edition of Sir Tristrem, after conjecturing one 
date for the birth of Thomas the Rhymer, avowedly 
alters it for the sake of identifying the Rhymer with Got- 
fried's ( Thomas of Britannia, and places his birth before 
the end of the twelfth century. This, be allows, would 
extend the Rhymer's- life to upwards of ninety years, a 
pretty fair age for the Scottish Tiresias j but if he survived 
1296, as Harry the minstrel informs us, he must have lived 
to beyond an hundred. 

1 His other works were the History of St. Alexius, from 
the Latin,- Scripture Histories: ?.nd Fifteen Tokens bf fore 



50 ESSAY ON 

In the course of Adam Davie's account of 
the siege of Jerusalem, Pilate challenges our 
Lord to single combat. From the speci- 
mens afforded by Warton, no very high idea 
can be formed of the genius of this poetical 
marshal. Warton anticipates the surprise 
of his reader, in finding the English language 
improve so slowly, when we reach the verses 
of Davie. The historian of our poetry had, in 
a former section, treated of Robert de Brunne 
as a writer anterior to Davie; but as the latter 
part of De Brunne's Chronicle was not fin- 
ished till 1339, in the reign of Edward III., 
it would be surprising indeed, if the language 
should seem to improve when we go back to 
the reign of Edward II. Davie's work may 
be placed in our poetical chronology, poste- 
rior to the first part of De Brunne's Chroni- 
cle, but anterior to the latter. 

the Day of Judgment. The two last were paraphrases of 
Scripture. Mr. Ellis ultimately retracted his opinion, 
adopted from Warton, that he was the author of a ro- 
mance entitled the life of Alexander. 



ENGLISH POETRY. 51 

Richard Rolle, another of our earliest 
versifiers, died in 1349. He was a hermit, 
and led a secluded life, near the nunnery 
of Hampole, in Yorkshire. Seventeen of 
his devotional pieces are enumerated in Kit* 
son's " Bibliographia Poetica." The peni- 
tential psalms and theological tracts of a 
hermit, were not likely to enrich or improve 
the style of our poetry; and they are accord- 
ingly confessed, by those who have read 
them, to be very dull. His name challenges 
notice, only from the paucity of contempo- 
rary writers. 

Laurence Minot, although he is conjectur- 
ed to have been a monk, had a Muse of a 
livelier temper, and for want of a better poet, 
he may, by courtesy, be called the Tyrtaeus 
of his age. His few poems which have 
reached us are, in fact, short narrative bal- 
lads on the victories obtained in the reign of 
Edward III. beginning with that of Halli- 
down Hill, and ending with the siege of 
Guisnes Castle. As his poem on the last of 
these events, was evidently written recently 
after the exploit, the era of his poetical 



S3 ESSAY ON 

career may be laid between the years 1332 
and 1352. Minet's works lay in absolute 
oblivion till late in the last century, in a 
MS. of the Cotton Collection, which was 
supposed to be a transcript of the works of 
Chaucer. The name of Richard Chawfir 
having been accidentally scrawled on a spare 
leaf of the MS. (probably the name of its 
ancient possessor), the framer of the Cotton 
catalogue, very goodnaturedly, converted it 
into Geoffrey Chaucer. By this circum- 
stance Mr. Tyrwhitt, when seeking materials 
for his edition of the Canterbury Tales, acci- 
dentally discovered an English versifier older 
than Chaucer himself. The style of Minot's 
ten military ballads is frequently alliterative, 
and has much of the Northern dialect. He 
is an easy and lively versifier, though not, 
as Mr. G. Chalmers denominates him, either 
elegant or energetic. 

In the course of the fourteenth century 
our language seems to have been inundated 
with metrical romances, until the public 
taste had been palled, by the mediocrity 
and monotony of the greater part of them. 



ENGLISH POETRY. 53 

At least, if Chaucer's host in the Canterbury 
Tales be a fair representation of contempo- 
rary opinion, they were held in no great 
reverence; to judge by the comparison which 
the vintner applies to the "drafty rhymings" 
of Sir Topaz. The practice, of translating 
French metrical romances into English, did 
not, however, terminate in the fourteenth 
century. Nor must we form an indiscrimi- 
nate estimate of the ancient metrical roman- 
ces, either from Chaucer's implied contempt 
for Ihem, nor from mine host of the Tabard's 
ungainly comparison with respect to one of 
them. The ridiculous style of Sir Topaz is 
not an image of them all. Some of them, 
far from being chargeable with impertinent 
and prolix description, are concise in narra- 
tion, and paint with rapid, but distinct 
sketches, the battles, the banquets, and the 
rites of worship of chivalrous life. Classical 
poetry has scarcely ever conveyed in shorter 
boundaries, so many interesting and compli- 
cated events, as may be found in the good 
5* 



54 ESSAY ON 

old romance of Le Bone Florence 1 . Chau- 
cer himself, when he strikes into the new, or 
allegorical, school of romance, has many 
passages more tedious, and less affecting, 
than the better parts of those simple old 
fablers. For in spite of their puerility in 
the excessive use of the marvellous, their 
simplicity is often touching, and they have 
many scenes that would form adequate sub- 
jects for the best historical pencils. 

The reign of Edward III. was illustrious 
not for military achievements alone; it was 
a period when the English character dis- 
played its first intellectual boldness. It is 
true that the history of the times presents a 
striking contrast between the light of intel- 
ligence which began to open on men's minds, 
and the frightful evils which were still per- 
mitted to darken the face of society. In the 
scandalous avarice of the church, in the cor- 
ruptions of the courts of judicature, and in 
the licentiousness of a nobility, who counte- 
nanced disorders and robbery, we trace the 

1 Given in Ritson's Old Metrical Romances. 



ENGLISH POETRY. 55 

tinbanished remains of barbarism; but, on 
the other hand, we may refer to this period, 
for the genuine commencement of our litera- 
ture, for the earliest diffusion of free inquiry, 
and for the first great movement of the na- 
tional mind towards emancipation from spiri- 
tual tyranny. The abuses of religion were, 
from their nature, the most powerfully calcu- 
lated to arrest the public attention ; and Poe- 
try was not deficient in contributing its influ- 
ence, to expose those abuses both as subjects 
of ridicule and of serious indignation. Two 
poets of this period, with very different pow- 
ers of genius, and probably addressing them- 
selves to different classes of society, made 
the corruptions of the clergy the objects of 
their satire — taking satire not in its mean 
and personal acceptation, but understanding 
it as the moral warfare of indignation and 
ridicule against turpitude and absurdity. 
Those writers were Langlande and Chaucer, 
both of whom have been claimed, as primi- 
tive reformers, by some of the zealous histo- 
rians of the Reformation. At the idea of a 
fall separation from the Catholic Church, 



56 ESSAY ON 

both Langlande and Chaucer would possibly 
have been struck with horror. The doctrine 
of predestination, which was a leading tenet 
of the first protestants, is not, I believe, 
avowed in any of Chaucer's writings, and it 
is expressly reprobated by Langlande. It is, 
nevertheless, very likely that their works 
contributed to promote the Reformation. 
Langlande, especially, who was an earlier 
satirist and painter of manners than Chaucer, 
is undaunted in reprobating the corruptions 
of the papal government. He prays to Hea- 
ven to amend the Pope, whom he charges 
with pillaging the Church, interfering un- 
justly with the King, and causing the Blood 
of Christians to be wantonly shed ; and it is 
a curious circumstance, that he predicts the 
existence of a king, who, in his vengeance, 
would destroy the monasteries. 

The work entitled " Visions of William 
concerning Piers Plowman 1 ," and concerning 

1 The work is commonly entitled the " Visions of Piers 
Plowman," but incorrectly, for Piers is not the dreamer 
who sees the visions, but one of the characters who is 
beheld, and who represents the Christian life. 



ENGLISH POETRY. 57 

the origin, progress, and perfection of the 
Christian life, which is the earliest known 
original poem, of any extent, in the English 
language, is ascribed to Robert Langlande, a 
secular priest, born at Mortimer's Cleobury, 
in Shropshire, and educated at Oriel College, 
Oxford. That it was written by Langlande, 
I believe can be traced to no higher autho- 
rity than that of Bale, or of the printer Craw- 
ley; but his name may stand for that of its 
author, until a better claimant shall be found. 

Those Visions, from their allusions to 
events evidently recent, can scarcely be 
supposed to have been finished later than 
the year 1362, almost thirty years before 
the appearance of the Canterbury Tales. 

It is not easy, even after Dr. Whitaker's 
laborious analysis of this work, to give any 
concise account of its contents. The gene- 
ral object is to expose, in allegory, the exist- 
ing abuses of society, and to inculcate the 
public and private duties both of the laity 
and clergy. An imaginary seer, afterwards 
described by the name of William, wander- 
ing among the bushes of the Malvern hills, 



58 ESSAY ON 1 

is overtaken by sleep, and dreams that he 
beholds a magnificent tower, which turns out 
to be the tower or fortress of Truth, and a 
dungeon, which, we soon after learn, is the 
abode of Wrong. In a spacious plain in 
front of it, the whole race of mankind are 
employed in their respective pursuits ; such 
as husbandmen, merchants, minstrels with 
their audiences, begging friars, and itinerant 
venders of pardons, leading a dissolute life 
under the cloak of religion. The last of 
these are severely satirised. A transition is 
then made to the civil grievances of society; 
and the policy, not the duty, of submitting 
to bad princes, is illustrated by the parable 
of the Rats and Cats. In the second canto, 
true Religion descends, and demonstrates, 
with many precepts, how the conduct of 
individuals, and the general management of 
society, may be amended. In the third and 
fourth canto, Mede or Bribery is exhibited, 
seeking a marriage with Falsehood, and 
attempting to make her way to the courts of 
justice* where, it appears, that she has many 
friends, both among Ihe civil judges and 



ENGLISH POETRY. 59 

ecclesiastics. The poem, after this, be- 
comes more and more desultory. The au- 
thor awakens more than once; but forget- 
ting that he has told us so, continues to con- 
verse as freely as ever, with the moral phan- 
tasmagoria of his dream. A long train of 
allegorical personages, whom it would not 
be very amusing to enumerate, succeeds. 
In fact, notwithstanding Dr. Whitaker's dis- 
covery of a plan and unity in this work, I 
cannot help thinking with Warton, that it 
possesses neither; at least, if it has any de- 
sign, it is the most vague and ill constructed 
that ever entered into the brain of a waking: 
dreamer. The appearance of the visionary 
personages is often sufficiently whimsical. 
The power of Grace, for instance, confers 
upon Piers Plowman, or " Christian Life,' 5 
four stout oxen, to cultivate the field of 
Truth ; these are, Matthew, Mark, Luke, 
and John, the last of whom is described as 
the gentlest of the team. She afterwards 
assigns him the like number of stots or bul- 
locks, to harrow what the evangelists had 
ploughed; and this new horned team con- 



60 ESSAY ON 

sists of saint or stot Ambrose, slot Austin* 
stot Gregory, and stot Jerome. 

The verse of Langlande is alliterative^ 
without rhyme, and of triple time. In mo- 
dern pronunciation it divides the ear between 
an anapaestic and dactylic cadence ; though 
some of the verses are reducible to no per- 
ceptible metre. Mr. Mil ford, in his Harmony 
of Languages, thinks that the more we ac- 
commodate the reading of it to ancient pro- 
nunciation, the more generally we shall find 
it run in an anapaestic measure. His style, 
even making allowance for its antiquity, has 
a vulgar air, and seems to indicate a mind 
that would have been coarse, though strong, 
in any state of society. But, on the other 
hand, his work, with all its tiresome homi- 
lies, illustrations from school divinity, and 
uncouth phraseology, has some interesting 
features of originality. Be employs no bor- 
rowed materials ; he is the earliest of our 
writers in whom there is a tone of moral 
reflection, and his sentiments are those of 
bold and solid integrity. The zeal of truth 
was in him ; and his vehement manner 



ENGLISH POETRY, 61 

sometimes rises to eloquence, when he de- 
nounces hypocrisy and imposture. The 
mind is struck with his rude voice, pro- 
claiming independent and popular senti- 
ments, from an age of slavery and supersti- 
tion, and thundering a prediction in the ear 
of papacy, which was doomed to be literally 
fulfilled at the distance of nearly two hundred 
years. His allusions to contemporary life 
afford some amusing glimpses of its man- 
ners There is room to suspect that Spen- 
ser was acquainted with his works; and 
Milton, either from accident or design, has 
the appearance of having had one of Lang- 
lande's passages in his mind, when he wrote 
the sublime description of the lazar-house, in 
Paradise Lost. 

Chaucer was probably known and distin- 
guished as a poet anterior to the appearance 
of Langiande's Visions. Indeed, if he had 
produced nothing else than his youthful poem, 
" the Court of Love," it was sufficient to 
indicate one destiued to harmonise and re- 
fine the national strains. But it is likely, 
that before his thirty-fourth year, about which 
6 



62 ESSAY ON 

time Lauglande's Visions may be supposed 
to have been finished, Chaucer had given 
several compositions to the public. 

The simple old narrative romance had be- 
come too familiar in Chaucer's time, to in- 
vite him to its beaten track. The poverty 
of his native tongue obliged him to look 
round for subsidiary materials to his fancy, 
both in the Latin language, and in some 
modern foreign source that should not appear 
to be trite and exhausted. His age was, un- 
fortunately, little conversant with the best 
Latin classics. Ovid, Claudian, and Sta- 
tius, were the chief favourites in poetry, and 
Boethius in prose. The allegorical style of 
the last of those authors, seems to have 
given an early bias to the taste of Chaucer. 
In modern poetry, his first, and long con- 
tinued, predilection w T as attracted by -the 
new and allegorical style of romance, which 
had sprung up, in France, in the thirteenth 
century, under William de Lorris. We 
find him, accordingly, during a great part of 
his poetical career, engaged among the 
dreams, emblems, flower-worshippings, and 



ENGLISH POETRY. 63 

amatcny parliaments, of that visionary school. 
This, we may say, was a gymnasium of 
rather too light and playful exercise for so 
strong a genius ; and it must be owned, that 
his allegorical poetry is often puerile and 
prolix. Yet, even in this walk of fiction, 
we never entirely lose sight of that peculiar 
grace, and gayety, which distinguish the 
Muse of Chaucer; and no one who remem- 
bers his productions of the House of Fame, 
and the Flower and the Leaf, will regret 
that he sported, for a season, in the field of 
allegory. Even his pieces of this descrip- 
tion, the most fantastic in design, and tedi- 
ous in execution, are generally interspersed 
with fresh and joyous descriptions of exter- 
nal nature. 

In this new species of romance, we per- 
ceive the youthful Muse of the language, in 
love with mystical meanings and forms of 
fancy, more remote, if possible, from reality, 
than those of the chivalrous fable itself; and 
we could, sometimes, wish her back from 
her emblematic castles, to the more solid 
ones of the elder fable: but still she moves 



64 ESSAY ON 

in pursuit of those shadows with an impulse 
of novelty, and an exuberance of spirit, that 
is not wholly without its attraction and de- 
light. 

Chaucer was, afterwards, happilj' drawn 
to the more natural style of Boccaccio, and 
from him he derived the hint of a subject, in 
which, besides his own original portraits of 
contemporary life, he could introduce stories 
of every description, from the most heroic to 
the most familiar. 

Gower, though he had been earlier dis- 
tinguished in French poetry, began later than 
Chaucer, to cultivate his native tongue. 
His " Confessio Amantis" the only work by 
which he is known as an English poet, did 
not appear till the sixteenth year of Richard 
II. He must have been a highly accom- 
plished man, for his time, and imbued with 
a studious and mild spirit of reflection. His 
French sonnets are marked by elegance and 
sensibility, and hi3 English poetry contains 
a digest of all that constituted the know- 
ledge of his age. His contemporaries greatly 
esteemed him; and the Scottish, as well as 



ENGLISH POETRY. 65 

English writers of the subsequent period, 
speak of him with unqualified admiration. 
But though the placid and moral Gower 
might be a civilizing spirit among his con- 
temporaries, his character has none of the 
bold originality which stamps an influence 
on the literature of a country. He was not, 
like Chaucer, a patriarch in the family of 
genius, the scattered traits of whose resem- 
blance may be seen in such descepdants as 
Shakspeare and Spenser. The design of 
his Confessio Amantis is peculiarly ill con- 
trived. A lover, whose case has not a par- 
ticle of interest, applies, according to the 
Catholic ritual, to a confessor, who, at the 
same time, whimsically enough, bears the 
additional character of a Pagan priest of 
Venus. The holy father, it is true, speaks 
like a good Christian, and communicates 
more scandal about the intrigues of Venus, 
than Pagan author ever told. A pretext is 
afforded by the ceremony of confession, for 
the priest not only to initiate his pupil in 
the duties^of a lover, but in a wide range of 
ethical and physical knowledge ; and at the 
6* 



66 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. 

mention of every virtue and vice, a tale is 
introduced by way of illustration. Does the 
confessor wish to warn the lover against im- 
pertinent curiosity ? he introduces, apropos 
to that failing, the history of Actaeon, of 
peeping memory. The confessor inquires if 
he is addicted to a vain-glorious disposition ; 
because if he is, he can tell him a story 
about Nebuchadnezzar. Does he wish to 
hear of the virtue of conjugal patience ? it is 
aptly inculcated by the anecdote respecting 
Socrates, who, when he received the con- 
tents of Xantippe's pail upon his head, re- 
plied to the provocation with only a witti- 
cism. Thus, with shrieving, narrations, and 
didactic speeches, the work is extended to 
thirty thousand lines, in the course of which, 
the virtues and vices are all regularly alle- 
gorized. But in allegory Gower is cold and 
uninventive, and enumerates qualities, when 
he should conjure up visible objects. On 
the whole, though copiously stored with 
facts and fables, he is unable either to make 
truth appear poetical, or to render fiction the 
graceful vehicle of truth. 



PART II. 



W arton, with great beauty and justice, ^Jf^ 
compares the appearance of Chaucer in our 
language, to a premature day in an English 
spring; after which the gloom of winter 
returns, and the buds and blossoms, which 
have been called forth by a transient sun- 
shine, are nipped by frosts and scattered by 
storms. The causes of the relapse of our 
poetry, after Chaucer, seem but too apparent 
in the annals of English history, which dur- 
ing fire reigns of the fifteenth century con- 
tinue to display but a tissue of conspiracies, 
proscriptions, and bloodshed. Inferior even 
to France in literary progress, England dis- 
plays in the fifteenth century a still more 
mortifying contrast with Italy. Italy too 
had her religious schisms and public distrac- 
tions; but her arts and literature had always 
a sheltering place. They were even che- 



68 ESSAY ON 

rished by the rivalship of independent com- 
munities, and received encouragement from 
the opposite sources of commercial and 
ecclesiastical wealth. But we had no Ni- 
cholas the Fifth, nor house of Medicis.. In 
England, the evils of civil war agitated 
society as one mass. There was no refuge 
from them — no inclosure to fence in the 
field of improvement — no mound to stem the 
torrent of public troubles. Before the death 
of Henry VI. it is said that one half of the 
nobility and gentry in the kingdom had 
perished in the field, or on the scaffold. 
Whilst in England the public spirit was thus 
brutalized, whilst the value and security of 
life were abridged, whilst the wealth of the 
rich was employed only in war, and the 
chance of patronage taken from the scholar ; 
in Italy, princes and magistrates vied with 
each other in calling men of genius around 
them, as the brightest ornaments of their 
states and courts. The art of printing came 
to Italy to record the treasuries of its lite- 
rary attainments; but when it came to En- 
gland, with a very few exceptions, it could 



ENGLISH POETRY. 69 

not be said, for the purpose of diffusing 
native literature, to be a necessary art. A 
circumstance, additionally hostile to the na- 
tional genius, may certainly be traced in 
the executions for religion, which sprung up 
as a horrible novelty in our country in the 
fifteenth century. The clergy were deter- 
mined to indemnify themselves for the ex- 
posures which they had met with in the 
preceding age, and the unhallowed compro- 
mise which Henry IV. made with them, in 
return for supporting his accession, armed 
them, in an evil hour, with the torch of per- 
secution. In one point of improvement, 
namely, in the boldness of religious inquiry, 
the North of Europe might already boast of 
being superior to the South, with all its 
learning, wealth, and elegant acquirements. 
The Scriptures had been opened by Wick- 
liff, but they were again to become " a foun- 
tain sealed, and a spring shut up." Amidst 
the progress of letters in Italy, the fine arts 
threw enchantment around superstition; and 
the warm imagination of the South was con- 
genial with the nature of catholic institu- 



70 ESSAY ON 

tions. But the English mind had already 
shewn, even amidst its comparative barba- 
rism, a stern independent spirit of religion ; 
and from this single proud and elevated 
point of its character, it was now to be 
crushed and beaten down. Sometimes a 
baffled struggle against oppression is more 
depressing to the human faculties than con- 
tinued submission. 

Our natural hatred of tyranny, and we 
may safely add, the general test of history 
and experience, would dispose us to believe 
religious persecution to be necessarily and 
essentially baneful to the elegant arts, no 
less than to the intellectual pursuits of man- 
kind. It is natural to think, that when 
punishments are let loose upon men's opi- 
nions, they will spread a contagious alarm 
from the understanding to the imagination. 
They will make the heart grow close and 
insensible to generous feelings, where it is 
unaccustomed to express them freely ; and 
the graces and gayety of fancy will be de- 
jected and appalled. In an age of persecu- 
tion, even the living study of his own spe- 



ENGLISH POETRY. 71 

cies must be comparatively darkened to the 
poet. He looks round on the characters 
and countenances of his fellow-creatures, and 
instead of the naturally cheerful and eccen- 
tric variety of their humours, he reads only 
a sullen and oppressed uniformity. To the 
spirit of poetry we should conceive such a 
period to be an impassable Avernus, where 
she would drop her wings and expire. Un- 
doubtedly this inference will be found war- 
ranted by a general survey of the history 
of Genius, It is, at the same time, impossi- 
ble to deny, that wit and poetry have in 
some instances flourished coeval with fero- 
cious bigotry, on the same spot, and under 
the same government. The literary glory 
of Spain was posterior to the establishment 
of the Inquisition. The fancy of Cervantes 
sported in its neighbourhood, though he de 
clared that he could have made his writings 
still more entertaining, if he had not dreaded 
the holy office. But the growth of Spanish 
genius, in spite of the co-existence of reli- 
gious tyranny, was fostered by uncommon 
and glorious advantages in the circumstances 



72 ESSAY ON 

of the nation. Spain (for we are comparing 
Spain in the sixteenth with England in the 
fifteenth century) was, at the period alluded 
to, great and proud in an empire, on which 
it was boasted that the sun never set. Her 
language was widely diffused. The wealth 
of America for a while animated all her arts. 
Robertson says, that the Spaniards discover- 
ed at that time an extent of political know- 
ledge, which the English themselves did 
not attain for more than a century after- 
wards. Religious persecutions began in En- 
gland, at a time when she was comparatively 
poor and barbarous ; yet after she had been 
awakened to so much intelligence on the 
subject of religion, as to make one half of 
the people indignantly impatient of priestly 
tyranny. If we add, to the political trou- 
bles of the age, the circumstance of religious 
opinions being silenced and stifled by penal 
horrors, it will seem more wonderful that 
the spark of literature was kept alive, than 
that it did not spread more widely. Yet the 
fifteenth century had its redeeming traits 
of refinement, the more wonderful for appear- 



ENGLISH POETRY. 73 

ing in the midst of such unfavourable cir- 
cumstances. It had a Fortescue, although 
he wandered in exile, unprotected by the 
constitution which he explained and extolled 
in his writings. It had a noble patron and 
lover of letters in Tiptoft, 1 although he died 
by the hands of the executioner. It wit- 
nessed the founding of many colleges in 
both of the universities, although they were 
still the haunts o£ scholastic quibbling ; and 
it produced, in the venerable Pecock, one 
conscientious dignitary of the church, who 
wished to have converted the protestants by 
appeals to reason, (hough for so doing he had 
his books, and, if he had not recanted in 
good time, would have had his body also, 
committed to the flames. To these causes 
may be ascribed the backwardness of our 
poetry between the dates of Chaucer and 
Spenser. I speak of the chasm extending 
to, or nearly to Spenser ; for, without under- 
valuing the elegant talents of Lord Surrey, 
I think we ^cannot consider the national ge- 

1 Earl of Worcester. 
7 



74 ESSAY ON 

nius as completely emancipated from oppres- 
sive circumstances, till the time of Eliza- 
beth. There was indeed a commencement 
of our poetry under Henry VIII. It was 
a fine, but a feeble one. English genius 
seems then to have come forth, but half 
assured that her day of emancipation was 
-at hand. There is something melancholy 
even in Lord Surrey's strains of gallantry. 
The succession of Henry VIII. gave stabili- 
ty to the government, and some degree of 
magnificence to the state of society. But 
tyranny was not yet at an end ; and to 
judge, not by the gross buffoons, but by the 
few minds entitled to be called poetical, 
which appear in the earlier part of the six- 
teenth century, we may say that the English 
Muse had still a diffident aspect and a fal- 
tering tone. 

There is a species of talent, however, 
which may continue to endite what is called 
poetry, without having its sensibilities deep- 
ly affected by the circumstances of society ; 
and of luminaries of this description our 
fifteenth century was not destitute. Ritson 



ENGLISH POETRY. 75 

has enumerated about seventy of them. 1 
Of these, Occleve and Lydgate were the 
nearest successors to Chaucer. Occleve 
speaks of himself as Chaucer's scholar. He 
has, at least, the merit of expressing the sin- 
cerest enthusiam for his master. But it 
is difficult to controvert the character, which 
has been generally assigned to him, that of 
a flat and feeble writer. Excepting the 
adoption of his story of Fortunatus, by Wil- 
liam Browne, in his pastorals, and the mo- 
dern re-publication of a few of his pieces, I 
know not of any public compliment which 
has ever been paid to his poetical memory. 
Lydgate is altogether the most respecta- 
ble versifier of the sixteenth century. A 
list of 250 of the productions ascribed to 
him (which is given in Ritson's Bibliographia 
Poetica) attests, at least, the fluency of his 
pen ; and he seems to have ranged with the 
same facility through the gravest and the 
lightest .subjects of composition. Ballads, 
hymns, ludicrous stories, legends, romances, 

1 In his Bibliographia Poetica, vol. i. 



76 ESSAY OIST 

and allegories, were equally at his command. 
Verbose and diffuse as Dan John of Bury 
must be allowed to have been, he is not 
without occasional touches of pathos. The 
poet Gray was the first in modern times 
who did him the justice to observe them. 1 
His u Fall of Princes" may also deserve 
notice, in tracing back the thread of our na- 

1 Vide vol. I. p. 59 of these Selections. He translated 
largely from the French and Latin. His principal poems 
are " The Fall of Princes, 1 » " The Siege of Thebes," 
and " The Destruction of Troy." The first of these is 
from Laurent's French version of Boccaccio's book " de 
Casibus virorum et feminarum illustrium." His " Siege 
of Thebes," which was intended as an additional Canter- 
bury Tale, and in the introduction to which he feigns him- 
self in company with M the host of the Tabard and the 
Pilgrims," is compiled from Guido Colonna, Statius, and 
Seneca. His " Destruction of Troy" is from the work 
of Guido Colonna, or from a French translation of it. 
His " London Lickpenny" is curious, for the minute pic- 
ture of the metropolis, which it exhibits, in the fiiteenth 
century. A specimen of Lydgate's humour may be seen 
in his tale of u The Prioress and her three Lovers," 
which Mr. Jamieson has given in his " Collection of Bal- 
lads." 1 had transcribed it from a manuscript in the 
British Museum, thinking that it was not in print ; but 
found that Mr. Jamieson had anticipated me. 



ENGLISH POETRY. 77 

tional poetry, as it is more likely than any 
other English production, to have suggested 
to Lord Sackville the idea of his " Mirror 
for Magistrates." The Mirror for Magis- 
trates again gave hints to Spenser in alle- 
gory, and may, also, have possibly suggested 
to Shakspeare the idea of his historical 
plays. 

I know not if Hardynge, who belonged to 
the reign of Edward IV., be worth mention- 
ing, as one of the obscure luminaries of this 
benighted age. He left a Chronicle of the 
History of England, which possesses an 
incidental interest from his having been 
himself a witness to some of the scenes 
which he records; for he lived in the family 
of the Percys, and fought under the banners 
of Hotspur ; but from the style of his versi- 
fied Chronicle, his head would appear to 
have been much better furnished for sustain- 
ing the blows of the battle, than for contriv- 
ing its poetical celebration. 

The Scottish poets of the fifteenth, and offfteemh the 
:a part of the sixteenth century, would alsoS^ 1 ^ 
justly demand a place, in any history of our 225? 

7* 



78 ESSAY ON 

poetry, that meant to be copious and minute; 
as the northern " makers," notwithstanding 
the difference of dialect, generally denomi- 
nate their language " Inglis." Scotland pro- 
duced an entire poetical version of the 
iEneid, before Lord Surrey had translated a 
single book of it ; indeed before there was 
an English version of any classic, excepting 
Boethius, if he can be called a classic* 
Virgil was only known in the English lan- 
guage through a romance on the Siege of 
Troy, published by Caxton, which, as Bishop 
Douglas observes, in the prologue to his 
Scottish JEneid, is no more like Virgil, than 
the devil is like St. Austin. Perhaps the 
resemblance may not even be so great. 
But the Scottish poets, after all that has 
been said of them, form nothing like a bril- 
liant revival of poetry. They are on the 
whole superior, indeed, in spirit and origi- 
nality to their English cotemporaries, which 
is not saying much; but their style is, for 
the most part, cast, if possible, in a worst 
taste. The prevailing fault of English dic- 
tion, in the fifteenth century, is redundant 



ENGLISH POETRY. 79 

ornament, and an affectation of anglicising 
Latin words. In this pedantry and use of 
"aureate terms" the Scottish versifiers went 
even beyond their brethren of the south. 
Some exceptions to the remark, I am aware, 
may be found in Dunbar, who sometimes 
exhibits simplicity and lyrical terseness ; 
but even his style has frequent deformities 
of quaintness, false ornament, and allitera- 
tion. The rest of them, when they meant 
to be most eloquent, tore up words from the 
Latin, which never took root in the lan- 
guage, like children making a mock garden 
with flowers and branches stuck in the 
ground, which speedily wither. 

From Lydgate down to Wyatt and Sur- 
rey, there seem to be no southern writers de- 
serving attention, unless for the purposes of 
the antiquary, excepting Hawes, Barclay, 
and Skelton, and even their names might 
perhaps be omitted, without treason to the 
cause of taste. 1 

1 To the reign of Henry VI. belongs Henry Lonelich, 
who plied the unpoetical trade of a skinner, and who 
translated the French romance of St. Graal j Thomas 



BO ESSAY ON 

Stephen Hawes, who was groom of the 
chamber to Henry VII., is said to have 
been accomplished in the literature of France 
and Italy, and to have travelled into those 
countries. His most important production 
is the " Pastyme of Pleasure," 1 an allegori- 
cal romance, the hero of which is Granda- 
mour, or Gallantry, and the heroine La 
Belle Pucelle, or Perfect Beauty. In this 
work the personified characters have all the 
capriciousness, and vague moral meaning, of 
the old French allegorical romance ; but the 
puerility of the school remains, while the 
zest of its novelty is gone. There is also in 
his foolish personage of Godfrey Gobelieve, 
something of the burlesque of the worst taste 
of Italian poetry. It is certainly very tire- 
some to follow Hawes's hero, Grandamour, 

Chestre made a free and enlarged version of the Lai de 
Lanval, of the French poetess Marie; and Robert Thorn- 
ton, who versified the " Morte Arthur" in the alliterative 
measure of Langlande. 

1 He also wrote the " Temple of Glass," the substance 
of which is taken from " Chaucer's House of Fame." 



ENGLISH POETRY. ol 

through all his adventures, studying gram- 
mar, rhetoric, and arithmetic, in the tower 
of Doctrine ; afterwards slaughtering giants, 
who have each two or three emblematic 
heads ; sacrificing to heathen gods, then 
marrying according to the catholic rites; 
and finally, relating his own death and 
burial, to which he is so obliging as to add 
his epitaph. Yet, as the story seems to be 
of Hawes's invention, it ranks him above 
the mere chroniclers and translators of the 
age. Warton praises him for improving on 
the style of Lydgate. His language may be 
somewhat more modern, but in vigour or 
harmony, I am at a loss to perceive in it 
any superiority The indulgent historian of 
our poetry has, however, quoted one fine 
line from him, describing the fiery breath 
of a dragon, which guarded the island of 
beauty. 

41 The fire was great; it made the island light." 

Every romantic poem in his own language 
is likely to have interested Spenser, and if 
there were many such glimpses of magnifi- 



82 ESSAY ON 

cence in Hawes, we might suppose the au- 
thor of the " Fairy Queen" to have cherish- 
ed his youthful genius by contemplating 
them ; but his beauties are too few and faint 
to have afforded any inspiring example to 
Spenser. 

Alexander Barclay was a priest of St. 
Mary Otterburne, in Devonshire, and died 
at a great age at Croydon, in the year 1532. 
His principal work was a free translation of 
Sebastian Brandfs l " Navis Stultifera," en- 
larged with some satirical strictures of his 
own upon the manners of his English cotem- 
poraries. His " Ship of Fools" has been as 
often quoted as most obsolete English po- 
ems ; but if it were not obsolete it would 
not be quoted. He also wrote Eclogues, 
which are curious as the earliest pieces of 
that kind in our language. From their title 
we might be led to expect some interesting 
delineations of English rural customs at that 
period. But Barclay intended to be a mo- 
ralist, and not a painter of nature ; and the 

1 Sebastian Brandt was a civilian,of Basil. 



ENGLISH POETRY. 83 

chief, though insipid, moral which he incul- 
cates is, that it is better to be a clown than 
a courtier. 1 The few scenes of country life 
which he exhibits for that purpose are sin- 
gularly ill fitted to illustrate his doctrine, and 
present rustic existence under a miserable 
aspect, more resembling the caricature of 
Scotland in Churchill's " Prophecy of Fam- 
ine," than any thing which we can imagine 
to have ever been the general condition of 
English peasants. The speakers, in one of 
his eclogues, lie littered among straw, for 
want of a fire to keep themselves warm ; and 
one of them expresses a wish that the milk 

1 Barclay gives some sketches of manners ; but they are 
those of the town, not the country. Warton is partial to 
his black letter eclogues, because they contain allusions to 
the customs of the age. They certainly inform us at 
what hour our ancestors usually dined, supped, and went 
to bed : that they were fond of good eating, and that it 
was advisable, in the poet's opinion, for any one who at- 
tempted to help himself to a favourite dish at their ban- 
quets to wear a gauntlet of mail. Quin the player, who 
probably never had heard of Barclay, delivered at a 
much later period a similar observation on city feasts ; 
namely, that the candidate for a good dish of turtle ought 
never to be without a basket-hilted knife and fork. 



84 ESSAY ON 

for dinner may be curdled, to save them the 
consumption of bread. As the writer's ob- 
ject was not to make us pity but esteem the 
rustic lot, this picture of English poverty can 
only be accounted for by supposing it to 
have been drawn from partial observation, 
or the result of a bad taste, that naturally 
delighted in squalid subjects of description. 
Barclay, indeed, though he has some stan- 
zas which might be quoted for their strength 
of thought and felicity of expression, is, 
upon the whole, the least ambitious of all 
writers to adorn his conceptions of familiar 
life with either dignity or beauty. An 
amusing instance of this occurs in one of 
his moral apologues : Adam, he tells us in 
verse, was one day abroad at his work — 
Eve was at the door of the house, with her 
children playing about her; some of them 
she was "kembing," says the poet, prefixing 
another participle not of the most delicate 
kind, to describe the usefulness of the comb. 
Her Maker having designed to pay her a 
visit, she was ashamed to be found with so 
many ill-drest children about her, and has- 



>.n 



ENGLISH POETRY. m 

tened to stow a number of them out of sight ; 
some of them she concealed under hay and 
straw, others she put up the chimney, and 
one or two into a " tub of draff." Having 
produced, however, the best looking and 
best dressed of them, she was delighted to 
hear their Divine Visitor bless them, and 
destine some of them to be kings and empe- 
rors, some dukes and barons, and others 
sheriffs, mayors, and aldermen. Unwilling 
that any of her family should forfeit blessings 
whilst they were going, she immediately 
drew out the remainder from their conceal- 
ment ; but when they came forth, they were 
so covered with dust and cobwebs, and had 
so many bits of chaff and straw slicking to 
their hair, that instead of receiving benedic- 
tions and promotion, they were doomed to 
vocations of toil and poverty, suitable to 
their dirty appearance. 

John Skelton, who was (he rival and con- 
temporary of Barclay, was laureate to the 
university of Oxford, and tutor to the Prince, 
afterwards Henry VIII. Erasmus must 
have been a bad judge of English poetry, or 
8 



86 ESSAY OX 

must have alluded only to the learning of 
Skelton, when 211 one of h'13 letters he pro- 
nounces him " Britannicarum literarum lu- 
men et decus," There is certainly a vehe- 
mence and vivacity in Skelton, which was 
worthy of being guided by a better taste ; 
and the objects of his satire bespeak some 
degree of public spirit. 1 But his eccentrici- 

1 He was the determined enemy of the mendicant friars 
and of Cardinal Wolsey. The courtiers of Henry VIII. 
whilst obliged to flatter a minister whom they detested, 
could not but be gratified with Skelton's boldness in sing- 
ly daring to attack him. In his picture of Wolsey at the 
Council Board, he thus describes the imperious minister ; 

11 Then in the chamber of stars 

" All matters there he mars ; 

11 Clapping his rod on the board, 

" No man dare speak a word ; 

" For he hath all the saying, 

4i Without any renaying. 

" He rolleth in his records, 

" He sayeth, how say ye, my lords, 

a Is not my reason good P 

44 Good even, good Robin Hood. 

" Some say yes, and some 

1 1 Sit still, as they were dumb." 



ENGLISH POETRY. 87 

ty in attempts at humour is at once vulgar 
and flippant, and his style is almost a tex- 
ture of slang phrases, patched with shreds of 
French and Latin. We are told, indeed, in 
a periodical work of the present day, that 
his manner is to be excused, because it was 
assumed for " the nonce," and was suited to 
the taste of his contemporaries. But it is 
surely a poor apology for the satirist of any 

These lines are a remarkable anticipation T of the very 
words in the fifteenth article of the charges preferred 
against W r olsey by the Parliament of 1529. " That the 
said Lord Cardinal, sitting among the Lords and other 
of your Majesty's most honourable Council, used himself 
so, that if any man would shew his mind according to his 
duty, he would so take him up with his accustomable words, 
that they were better to hold their peace than to speak, so 
that he would hear no more speak, but one or two great 
personages, so that he would have all the words himself, 
and consumed much time without a fair tale." His ridi- 
cule drew down the wrath of Wolsey, who ordered him 
to be apprehended. But Skelton fled to the sanctuary of 
Westminster Abbey, where he was protected ; and died 
in the same year in which Wolsey 's prosecutors drew up 
the article of impeachment, so similar to the satire of the 
poet. 

I Neve's Cursory Remarks on the English Poets, 



88 ESSAY ON 

age, to say that he stooped to humour its 
vilest taste, and could not ridicule vice and 
folly without degrading himself to buffoone- 
ry. Upon the whole, we might regard the 
poetical feeling and genius of England as 
almost extinct at the end of the fifteenth 
century, if the beautiful ballad of the " Nut- 
brown Maid" were not to be referred to that 
period. 1 It is said to have been translated 
from the German ; but even considered as a 
translation, it meets us as a surprising flower 
amidst the winter-solstice of our poetry, 
sixteenth The literary character of England was 
cemury. not esta blisbed till near the end of the six- 
teenth century. At the begginning of that 
century, immediately anterior to Lord Sur- 
rey, we find Barclay and Skelton popular 
candidates for the foremost honours of Eng- 
lish poetry. They are but poor names.— 
Yet slowly as the improvement of our poe- 
try seems to proceed in the early part of the 
sixteenth century, the circumstances which 
subsequently fostered the national genius to 



1 Warton places it about the year 1500. 



ENGLISH POETRY. M 

its maturity and magnitude, begin to be dis- 
tinctly visible even before the year 1500. — 
The accession of Henry VII., by fixing the 
monarchy and the prospect of its regular 
succession, forms a great era of commencing 
civilization. The art of printing, which had 
been introduced in a former period of dis- 
cord, promised to diffuse its light in a steadi- 
er and calmer atmosphere. The great dis- 
coveries of navigation, by quickening the 
intercourse of European nations, extended 
their influence to England. In the short 
portion of the fifteenth century, during 
which printing was known in this country, 
the press exhibits our literature at a lower 
ebb than even that of France; but before 
that century was concluded, the tide of clas- 
sical learning had fairly set in. England 
had received Erasmus, and had produced Sir 
Thomas More. The English poetry of the 
last of these great men is indeed of trifling 
consequence, in comparison with the gene- 
ral impulse which his other writings must 
have given to the age in which he lived. — 
But every thing that excites the dormant 
8 * 



90 ESSAY ON 

intellect of a nation, must be regarded as 
contributing to its future poetry. It is pos- 
sible, that in thus adverting to the diffusion 
of knowledge (especially classical know- 
ledge) which preceded our golden age of 
originality, we may be challenged by the 
question, how much the greatest of all our 
poets was indebted to learning. We are 
apt to compare such geniuses as Shakspeare 
to comets in the moral universe, which baf- 
fle all calculations as to the causes which 
accelerate or retard their appearance, or 
from which we can predict their return.— 
But those phenomena of poetical inspira- 
tion are, in fact, still dependant on the laws 
and light of the system which they visit. — 
Poets may be indebted to the learning and 
philosophy of their age, without being them- 
selves men of erudition or philosophers. — 
When the fine sprit of truth has gone abroad, 
it passes insensibly from mind to mind, in- 
dependent of its direct transmissions from 
books ; and it comes home in a more wel- 
come shape to the poet, when caught from 
bis social intercourse with his species, than 



ENGLISH POETRY. 91 , 

Item solitary study. Shakspeare's genius 
was certainly indebted to the intelligence 
and moral principles which existed in his 
age, and to that intelligence and to those 
moral principles, the revival of classical lit- 
erature undoubtedly contributed. So also 
did the revival of pulpit eloquence, and the 
restoration of the Scriptures to the people 
in their native tongue. The dethronement 
of scholastic philosophy, and of the suppo- 
sed infallibility of Aristotle's authority, an 
authority at one time almost paramount to 
that of the Scriptures themselves, was ano- 
ther good connected with the Reformation ; 
for though the logic of Aristotle long con- 
tinued to be formally taught, scholastic the- 
ology was no longer sheltered beneath his 
name. Bible divinity superseded the glos- 
ses of the schoolmen, and the writings of 
Duns Scotus were consigned at Oxford to 
proclaimed contempt. 1 The reign of true 

i Namely in Ihe year U35. The decline of Aritotle's 
authority, and that of scholastic divinity, though to a cer- 
tain degree connected, are not, however, to be identified. 



92 ESSAY ONf 

philosophy was not indeed arrived, and the 
Reformation itself produced events tend- 
ing to retard that progress of literature and 
intelligence, which had sprung up under its 
first auspices. Still, with partial interrup- 
tions, the culture of classical literature pro- 

What were called the doctrines of Aristotle by the school- 
men, were a mass of metaphysics established in his name, 
first by Arabic commentators, and afterwards by Catholic 
doctors ; among the latter of whom, many expounded the 
philosophy of the Stagyrite, without understanding a 
word of the original language, in which his doctrines were 
written. Some Platonic opinions had also mixed with the 
metaphysics of the schoolmen. Aristotle was neverthe- 
less their main authority ; though it is probable that, if he 
had come to life, he would not have fathered much of the 
philosophy which rested on his name. Seme of the re- 
formers threw off scholastic divinity and Aristotle's au- 
thority at once; but others, while they abjured the school- 
men, adhered to the Peripatetic system. In fact, until 
the revival of letters, Aristotle could not be said, with re- 
gard to the modern world, to be either fully known by his 
own works, or fairly tried by his own merits. Though 
ultimately overthrown by Bacon, his writings and his 
name, in the age immediately preceding Bacon, had 
ceased to be a mere stalking-horse to the schoolmen, and 
he was found to contain heresies which the Catholic meta- 
physicians had little suspected. 



ENGLISH POETRY. 93 

ceeded in the sixteenth century, and, amidst 
that culture, it is difficult to conceive that a 
system of Greek philosophy more poetical 
than Aristotle's, was without its influence on 
the English spirit — namely, that of Plato.— 
That England possessed a distinct school of 
Platonic philosophy in the sixteenth centu- 
ry, cannot, I believe, be affirmed, 1 but we 
hear of the Platonic studies of Sir Philip Syd- 
ney ; and traits of Platonism are sometimes 
beautifully visible iu the poetry of Surrey 
and of Spenser. 2 The Italian Muse com- 

1 En6eld mentions no English school of Platonism be- 
fore the time of Gale and Cudworth. 

3 In one of Spenser's hymns on Love and Beauty, he 
breathes this platonic doctrine. 

el Every spirit, as it is most pure 



" And hath in it the more of heavenly light, 
M So it the fairer body doth procure 
u To habit in, and it more fairly dight 
" With cheerful grace and amiable sight -, 
" For of the soul the body form doth take, 
" For soul is form, and doth the body make. 1 * 

?o, also, Surrey to his fair Geraldine. 



94 ESSAY ON 

municated a tinge of that spirit to our poe- 
try, which must have been farther excited 
in the minds of poetical scholars by the in- 
fluence of Grecian literature. Hurd indeed 
observes, that the Platonic doctrines had a 
deep influence on the sentiments and char- 
acter of Spenser's age. They certainly 
form a very poetical creed of philosophy. 
The Aristotelian system was a vast me- 
chanical labyrinth, which the human facul- 
ties were chilled, fatigued, and darkened by 
exploring. Plato at least expands the ima- 
gination, for he was a great poet ; and if he 
had put in practice the law respecting poets 

" The golden gift that Nature did thee give, 
" To fasten friends, and feed them at thy will 
4i With form and favour, taught me to believe 
41 How thou art made to shew her greatest skill." 

This last thought was probably suggested by the lines 
in Petrarch, which express a doctrine of the Platonic 
school, respecting the idea or origin of beauty. 

" In qual parte del cieP, in quale idea 
"'Eral'esempio onde Natura tolse 
" Quel bel viso leggiadro, in che ella volse 
" Mostrar quaggifi, quanto lassi potea." 



ENGLISH POETRY. 95 

which he prescribed to his idea! republic, 
he must have begun by banishing him- 
self. 

The Reformation, though ultimately bene- 
ficial to literature, like all abrupt changes in 
society, brought its evil with its good. Its 
establishment under Edward Vi. made the 
English too fanatical and polemical to at- 
tend to the finer objects of taste. Its com- 
mencement under Henry VIII., however 
promising at first, was too soon rendered 
frightful, by bearing the stamp of a tyrant's 
character, who, instead of opening the tem- 
ple of religious peace, established a Janus- 
faced persecution against both the old and 
new opinions. On the other hand, Henry's 
power, opulence, and ostentation, gave some 
encouragement to the arts. He himself, 
monster as he was, affected to be a poet — 
His masques and pageants assembled the 
beauty and nobility of the land, and prompt- 
ed a gallant spirit of courtesy. The cultiva- 
tion of musical talents among his courtiers 
fostered our early lyrical poetry. Our inter- 
course w T ith Italv was renewed from more en- 



96 ESSAY ON ■ 

lightened motives than superstition, and under 
the influence of Lord Surrey, Italian poetry 
became once more, as it had been in the days 
of Chaucer, a source of refinement and re- 
generation to our own. 1 am not indeed 
disposed to consider the influence of Lord 
Surrey's works upon our language in the 
very extensive and important light in which 
it is viewed by Dr. Noli. I am doubtful if 
that learned editor has converted many 
readers to his opinion, that Lord Surrey was 
the first who gave us metrical instead of 
rhythmical versification ; for, with just allow- 
ance for ancient pronunciation, the heroic 
measure of Chaucer will be found in general 
not only to be metrically correct, but to 
possess considerable harmony. Surrey w f as 
not the inventor of our metrical versifica- 
tion ; nor had his genius the potent voice 
and the magic spell which rouse all the 
dormant energies of a language. In certain 
walks of composition, though not in the 
highest, viz. in the ode, elegy, and epitaph, 
he set a chaste and delicate example ; but 
he w r as cut off too early in life, and cultivat- 



ENGLISH POETRY. 97 

ed poetry too slightly, to carry the pure 
stream of his style into the broad and bold 
channels of inventive fiction. Much un- 
doubtedly he did, in giving sweetness to our 
numbers, and in substituting for the rude tau- 
tology of a former age, a style of soft and 
brilliant ornament, of selected expression, 
and of verbal arrangement, which often 
winds into graceful novelties; though some- 
times a little objectionable from its involu- 
tion. Our language was also indebted to 
him for the introduction of blank verse. It 
may be noticed at the same time that blank 
verse, if it had continued to be written as 
Surrey wrote it, would have had a cadence 
too uniform and cautious to be a happy vehi- 
cle for the dramatic expression of the pas- 
sions. Grimoald, the second poet who used 
it after Lord Surrey, gave it a little more 
variety of pauses; but it was not till it had 
been tried as a measure by several compo- 
sers, that it acquired a bold and flexible mo- 
dulation. 

The genius of Sir Thomas Wyatt was 
refined and elevated like that of his noble 
9 



93 ESSAY ON 

friend arid contemporary ; but his poetry is 
more sententious and sombrous, and in his 
lyrical effusions he studied terseness rather 
than suavity. Besides these two interesting 
men, Sir Francis Brj'an the friend of Wyatt, 
George Viscount Rochford the brother of 
Anna Boleyne, and Thomas Lord Vaux, 
were poetical courtiers of Henry VIII. To 
the second of these Ritson assigns, though 
but by conjecture, one of the most beautiful 
and plaintive strains of our elder poetry, 
" O Death, rock me on sleep." In Totelfs 
Collection, the earliest poetical miscellany 
in our language, two pieces are ascribed to 
the same nobleman, the one entitled " The 
Assault of Love," the other beginning, " I 
loath that I did love," which have been fre- 
quently reprinted in modern times. 

A poem of uncommon merit in the same 
collection, which is entitled " The restless 
state of a Lover," and which commences 
with these lines, 

" The sun when lie hath spread his rays, 
And shew'd his face ten thousand ways," 



ENGLISH POETRY. 99 

has been ascribed by Dr. Nott to Lord Sur- 
rey, but not on decisive evidence. 

In the reign of Edward VI. the effects of 
the Reformation became visible in our poe- 
try, by blending religious with poetical en- 
thusiasm, or rather by substituting the one 
for the other. The national Muse became 
puritanical, and was not improved by the 
change. Then flourished Sternhold and 
Hopkins, who, with the best intentions and 
the worst taste, degraded the spirit of He- 
brew 7 psalmody by flat and homely phraseo- 
logy ; and mistaking vulgarity for simplicity, 
turned into bathos what they found sublime. 
Such was the love of versifying holy writ at 
that period, that the Acts of the Apostles 
were rhymed, and set to music by Christo- 
pher Tye. 1 

1 To the reign of Edward VI. and Mary may be refer- 
red two or three contributors to the " Paradise of 
Dainty Devices," who, though their lives extended into 
the reign of Elizabeth, may exemplify the state of poetical 
language before her accession. Among these may be 
placed Edwards, author of the pleasing little piece, 
"Amantium irse amoris redintegratio," and Hunnis, author 
of the following song. 



,100 ESSAY ON 

Lord Sackville's name is the next of any 
importance in our poetry that occurs after 
Lord Surrey's. The opinion of Sir Egerton 
Brydges with respect to the date of the first 
appearance of Lord Sackville's " Induction 
to the Mirror for Magistrates," would place 
that production, in strictness of chronology, 

11 When first mine eyes did view and mark 

Thy beauty fair for to behold, 

And when mine ears 'gan first to hark 

The pleasant words that thou me told, 

I would as then I had been free, 

From ears to hear, and eyes to see. 

"And when in mind I did consent 
To follow thus my fancy's will, 
And when my heart did first relent 
To taste such bait myself to spill, 
I would my heart had been as thine, 
Or else thy heart as soft as mine. 

u O flatterer false ! thou traitor born, 
What mischief more might thou devise, 
Than thy dear friend to have in scorn, 
And him to wound in sundry wise ; 
Which still a friend pretends to be, 
And art not so by proof I see ? 
Fie, fie upon such treachery." 



ENGLISH POETRY. 101 

at the beginning of Elizabeth's reign. As 
an edition of the " Mirror," however, ap- 
peared in 1559, supposing Lord Sackville 
not to have assisted in that edition, the first 
shape of the work must have been cast and 
composed in the reign of Mary. From the 
date of Lord Sackville's birth it is also ap- 
parent, that although he flourished under 
Elizabeth, and lived even to direct the 
councils of James, his prime of life must 
have been spent and his poetical character 
formed in the most disastrous period of the 
sixteenth century, a period when we may 
suppose the cloud that was passing over the 
public mind to have cast a gloom on the 
complexion of its literary taste. During 
five years of his life, from twenty-five to 
thirty, the time when sensibility and reflec- 
tion meet most strongly, Lord Sackville wit- 
nessed the horrors of Queen Mary's reign, 
and I conceive that it is not fanciful to 
trace in his poetry the tone of an unhappy 
age. His plan for " The Mirror of Magis- 
trates," is a mass of darkness and despon- 
dency. He proposed to make the figure of 



102 ESSAY ON 

Sorrow introduce us in Hell to every unfor- 
tunate great character of English history. 
The poet, like Dante, takes us to the gates 
of Hell; but he does not, like the Italian 
poet, bring us back again. It is true that 
those doleful legends were long continued, 
during a brighter period ; but this was only 
done by an inferior order of poets, and was 
owing to their admiration of Sackvilie. 
Dismal as his allegories may be, his genius 
certainly displays in them considerable 
power. But better times were at hand. 
In the reign of Elizabeth, the English mind 
put forth its energies in every direction, 
exalted by a purer religion, and enlarged by 
new views of truth. This was an age of 
loyalty, adventure, and generous emulation. 
The chivalrous character was softened by 
intellectual pursuits, while the genius of 
chivalry itself still lingered, as if unwilling 
to depart, and paid his last homage to a war- 
like and female reign. A degree of roman- 
tic fancy remained in the manners and 
superstitions of the people; and allegory 
might be said to parade the streets in their 



ENGLISH POETRY. 103 

public pageants and festivities. Quaint and 
pedantic as those allegorical exhibitions 
might often be, the} 7 were nevertheless more 
expressive of erudition, ingenuity, and moral 
meaning, than they had been in former 
times. The philosophy of the highest minds 
still partook of a visionary character. A 
poetical spirit infused itself into the practi- 
cal heroism of the age; and some of the 
worthies of that period seem less like ordi- 
nary men, than like beings called forth out 
of fiction, and arrayed in the brightness of 
her dreams. They had " High thoughts 
seated in a heart of courtesy." 1 The life of 
Sir Philip Sydney was poetry put into 
action. 

The result of activity and curiosity in the 
public mind was to complete the revival of 
classical literature, to increase the importa- 
tion of foreign books, and to multiply transla- 
tions, from which poetry supplied herself with 
abundant subjects and materials, and in the 
use of which she shewed a frank and fearless 

1 An expression used by Sir P. Sydney. 



104 ESSAY ON 

energy, that criticism and satire had not yet 
acquired power to overawe. Romance came 
back to us from the southern languages, 
clothed in new luxury by the warm imagi- 
nation of the south. The growth of poetry 
under such circumstances might indeed be 
expected to be as irregular as it was profuse. 
The field was open to daring absurdity, as 
well as to genuine inspiration ; and accord- 
ingly there is no period in which the ex- 
tremes of good and bad writing are so abun- 
dant. Stanihurst, for instance, carried the 
violence of nonsense to a pitch of which 
there is no preceding example. Even late 
in the reign of Elizabeth, Gabriel Harvey was 
aided and abetted by several men of genius, 
in his conspiracy to subvert the versification 
of the language; and Lylly gained over the 
court, for a time, to employ his corrupt jar- 
gon called Euphuism. Even Puttenham, 
a grave and candid critic, leaves an indica- 
tion of crude and puerile taste, when, in a 
laborious treatise on poetry, he directs the 
composer how to make verses beautiful to 
the eye, by writing them " in the shapes of 
eggs, turbots, fuzees. and lozenges.'" 



ENGLISH POETRY. 105 

Among the numerous poets belonging ex- 
clusively to Elizabeth's reign, 1 Spenser stands 
without a class and without a rival. To 
proceed from the poets already mentioned 
to Spenser, is certainly to pass over a con- 
siderable number of years, which are impor- 
tant, especially from their including the 
dates of those early attempts in the regular 
drama, which preceded the appearance of 
Shakspeare. 2 I shall therefore turn back 
again to that period, after having done hom- 
age to the name of Spenser. 

He brought to the subject of " The Fairy 
Queen," a new and enlarged structure of 
stanza, elaborate and intricate, but well con- 
trived for sustaining the attention of the 
ear, and concluding with a majestic cadence. 
In the other poets of Spenser's age we chiefly 
admire their language, when it seems casu- 
ally to advance into modern polish and suc- 

1 Of Shakspeare's career a part only belongs to Eliza- 
beth's reign, and of Jonson's a still smaller. 

2 The tragedy of Gorboduc by Lord Sackville, was 
represented in 1562. Spenser's Pastorals were published 
in 1579. The Fairy Queen appeared in 1590. 



106 ESSAY OJNT 

cinctness. But the antiquity of Spenser's 
style has a peculiar charm. The mistaken 
opinion that Ben Jonson censured the anti- 
quity of the diction in the " Fairy Queen," 1 
has been corrected by Mr. Malone, who pro- 
nounces it to be exactly that of his con- 
temporaries. His authority is weighty ; still, 
however, without reviving the exploded 
error respecting Jonson's censure, one might 
imagine the difference of Spenser's style 
from that of Shakspeare's, whom he so shortly 
preceded, to indicate that his gothic subject 
and story made him lean towards words of 
the elder time. At all events, much of his 
expression is now become antiquated ; 
though it is beautiful in its antiquity, and 
like the moss and ivy on some majestic 
building, covers the fabric of his language 
with romantic and venerable associations. 

His command of imagery is wide, easy, 
and luxuriant. He threw the soul of har- 
mony into our verse, and made it more 

1 Ben Jonson applied his remark to Spenser's Pasto- 
rals. 



ENGLISH POETRY. 107 

warmly, tenderly, and magnificently descrip- 
tive, than it ever was before, or, with, a few 
exceptions, than it has ever been since. It 
must certainly be owned that in description 
he exhibits nothing of the brief strokes and 
robust power, which characterise the very 
greatest poets; but we shall nowhere find 
more airy and expansive images of visionary 
things, a sweeter tone of sentiment, or a 
finer flush in the colours of language, than in 
this Rubens of English poetry* His fancy 
teems exuberantly in minuteness of circum- 
stance, like a fertile soil sending bloom and 
verdure through the utmost extremities of 
the foliage which it nourishes. On a com- 
prehensive view of the whole work, we cer- 
tainly miss the charm of strength, symmetry, 
and rapid or interesting progress ; for, though 
the plan which the poet designed is not com- 
pleted, it is easy to see that no additional 
cantos could have rendered it less perplexed. 
But still there is a richness in his materials, 
even where their coherence is loose, and 
their disposition confused. The clouds of 
bis allegory may seem to spread into shape- 



108 ESSAY ON 

less forms, but they are still the clouds of a 
glowing atmosphere. Though his story 
grows desultory, the sweetness and grace of 
his manner still abide by him. He is like a 
speaker whose tones continue to be pleasing, 
though he may speak too long ; or like a 
painter who makes us forget the defect of 
his design, by the magic of his colouring. 
We always rise from perusing him with 
melody in the miners ear, and with pictures 
of romantic beauty impressed on the imagi- 
nation. For these attractions the " Fairy 
Queen" will ever continue to be resorted to 
by the poetical student. It is not, however, 
very popularly read, and seldom perhaps 
from beginning to end, even by those who 
can fully appreciate its beauties. This can- 
not be ascribed merely to its presenting a 
few words which are now obsolete ; nor can 
it be owing, as has been sometimes alleged, 
to the tedium inseparable from protracted 
allegory. Allegorical fable may be made 
entertaining. With every disadvantage of 
dress and language, the humble John Bun- 
yan has made this species of writing very 
amusing. 



ENGLISH POETRY. 109 

The reader may possibly smile at the 
names of Spenser and Bunyan being brought 
forward for a moment in comparison; but it 
is chiefly because the humbler allegorist is 
so poor in language, that his power of inter- 
esting the curiosity is entitled to admiration. 
We are told by critics that the passions may 
be allegorized, but that Holiness, Justice, 
and other such thin abstractions of the mind, 
are too unsubstantial machinery for a poet; 
— yet we all know how well the author of 
the Pilgrim's Progress (and he was a poet 
though he wrote in prose) has managed such 
abstractions as Mercy and Fortitude. In 
his artless hands, those attributes cease to 
be abstractions, and become our most inti- 
mate friends. Had Spenser, with all the 
wealth and graces of his fancy, given his 
story a more implicit and animated form, I 
cannot believe that there was any thing in the 
nature of his machinery to set bounds to his 
power of enchantment. Yet, delicious as bis 
poetry is, his story, considered as a romance, 
is obscure, intricate, and monotonous. He 
translated entire cantos from Tasso, but 
10 



110 ESSAY ON 

adopted the wild and irregular manner of 
Afiosto. The difference is, that Spenser ap- 
pears like a civilized being, slow, and some- 
times half forlorn, in exploring an uninha- 
bited country, while Ariosto traverses the re- 
gions of romance like a hardy native of its 
pathless wilds. Hurd and others, who for- 
bid us to judge of the " Fairy Queen" by 
the test of classical unity, and who com- 
pare it to a gothic church, or a gothic gar- 
den, tell us what is little to the purpose. — 
They cannot persuade us that the story is 
not too intricate and too diffuse. The 
thread of the narrative is so entangled, that 
the poet saw the necessity for explaining the 
design of his poem in prose, in a letter to 
Sir Walter Raleigh ; and the perspicuity of 
a poetical design which requires such an ex- 
planation, may, with no great severity, be 
pronounced a contradiction in terms. It is 
degrading to poetry, we shall perhaps be 
told, to attach importance to the mere story 
which it relates. Certainly the poet is not 
a great one, whose only charm is the man- 



ENGLISH POETRY. Ill 

agement of his fable ; but where there is a 
fable, it should be perspicuous. 

There is one peculiarity in the " Fairy 
Queen" which, though not a deeply pervad- 
ing defect, I cannot help considering as an 
incidental blemish; namely, that the allego- 
ry is doubled and crossed with complimenta- 
ry allusions to living or recent personages, 
and that the agents are partly historical and 
partly allegorical. In some instances the 
characters have a threefold allusion. GIo- 
riana is at once an emblem of true glory, an 
empress of fairy-land, and her Majesty 
Queen Elizabeth. Envy is a personified 
passion, and also a witch, and, with no very 
charitable insinuation, a type of the unfor- 
tunate Mary Queen of Scots. The knight 
in dangerous distress is Henry IV. of 
France; and the knight of magnificence, 
Prince Arthur, the son of Uther Pendragon, 
an ancient British hero, is the bulwark of the 
Protestant cause in the Netherlands. Such 
distraction of allegory cannot well be said 
to make a fair experiment of its power. — 
The poet may cover his moral meaning un- 



112 ESSAY ON 

der a single and transparent veil of fiction ; 
but he has no right to muffle it up in fold- 
ings which hide the form and symmetry of 
truth. 

Upon the whole, if I may presume to 
measure the imperfections of so great and 
venerable a genius, I think we may say 
that, if his popularity be less than universal 
and complete, it is not so much owing to 
his obsolete language, nor to degeneracy of 
modern taste, nor to his choice of allegory 
as a subject, as to the want of that consoli* 
dating and crowning strength, which alone 
can establish works of fiction in the favour 
of all readers and of all ages. This want 
of strength, it is but justice to say, is either 
solely or chiefiy apparent when we examine 
the entire structure of his poem, or so large 
a portion of it as to feel that it does not im- 
pel or sustain our curiosity in proportion to 
its length. To the beauty of insulated pas- 
sages who can be blind ? The suhlime de- 
scription of 4 Him who with the Night durst 
rider " The House of Riches," " The Can- 
to of Jealousy," " The Masque of Cupid," 



ENGLISH POETRY. 113 

and other parts, too many to enumerate, 
are so splendid, that after reading them, we 
feel it for the moment invidious to ask if they 
are symmetrically united into a whole. — 
Succeeding generations have acknowledged 
the pathos and richness of his strains, and 
the new contour and enlarged dimensions of 
grace which he gave to English poetry. He 
is the poetical father of a Milton and a 
Thomson. Gray habitually read him when 
he wished to frame his thoughts for compo- 
sition, and there are few eminent poets in the 
language who have not been essentially in- 
debted to him. 

" Hither, as to their fountain, other stars 

" Repair, and in their urns draw golden light." 

The publication of the Fairy Queen and 
the commencement of Shakspeare's dramat- 
ic career, may be noticed as contemporary 
events; for by no supposition can Shaks- 
peare's appearance as a dramatist be traced 
higher than 1589, and that of Spenser's 
great poem was in the year 1590. I turn 
back from that date to an earlier period, 
10* 



114 ESSAY 01ST 

when the first lineaments of our regular dra- 
ma began to shew themselves. 

Before Elizabeth's reign we had no dra* 
matic authors more important than Bale and 
Heywood the Epigrammatist. Bale, before 
the titles of tragedy and comedy were well 
distinguished, had written comedies on such 
subjects as the Ressurrection of Lazarus, and 
the Passion and Sepulture of our Lord. He 
was, in fact, the last of the race of mystery- 
writers. Both Bale and Heywood died 
about the middle of the sixteenth century, 
but flourished (if such a word can be applied 
to them) as early as the reign of Henry 
VIII. Until the time of Elizabeth, the pub- 
lic was contented with mysteries, morali- 
ties, or interludes, too humble to deserve 
the name of comedy. The first of these, 
the mysteries, originated almost as early as 
the Conquest, in shews given by the church 
to the people. The moralities, which were 
chiefly allegorical, probably arose about the 
middle of the fifteenth century, and the in- 



ENGLISH POETRY. 115 

terludes became prevalent during the reign 
of Henry VIII. 1 

Lord Sackville's Gorboduc (first repre- 
sented in 1562,) and Still's Gammer Gor- 
ton's Needle, which appeared in 1566, were 
the earliest, though faint, draughts of our 
regular tragedy and comedy. They did not, 
however, immediately supersede the taste for 
the allegorical moralities. Sackville even 
introduced dumb shew in his tragedy to ex- 
plain the piece, and he was not the last of 
the old dramatists who did so. One might 
conceive the explanation of allegory by real 
personages to be a natural complaisance to 
an audience; but there is something pecu- 
liarly ingenious in making allegory explain 
reality, and the dumb interpret for those who 
could speak. In reviewing the rise of the 

1 Warton also mentions Rastal, the brother-in-law of 
Sir Thomas More, who was a printer; but who is be- 
lieved by the historian of our poetry to have been also an 
author, and to have made the moralities in some degree 
the vehicle of science and philosophy. He published a 
new interlude on the nature of the four elements, in 
which The Tract3 of America lately discovered and the 
manners of the natives are described. 



116 ESSAY ON 

drama, Gammer Gurton's Needle, and Sack- 
ville's Gorboduc, form convenient resting 
places for the memory ; but it may doubted 
if their superiority over the mysteries and 
moralities be half so great as their real dis- 
tance from an affecting tragedy, or an ex- 
hilarating comedy. The main incident in 
Gammer Gurton's Needle is the loss of a 
needle in a man's small-clothes. Gorboduc 
has no interesting plot or impassioned dia- 
logue ; but it dignified the stage with moral 
reflection and stately measure. It first in- 
troduced blank verse instead of ballad rhymes 
in the drama. Gascoigne gave a farther 
popularity to blank verse by his paraphrase 
of Jocasta, from Euripides, which appeared 
in 1566. The same author's " Supposes," 
translated from Ariosto, was our earliest 
prose comedy. Its dialogue is easy and 
spirited. Edward's Palemon and Arcite was 
acted in the same year, to the great admira- 
tion of Queen Elizabeth, who called the 
author into her presence, and complimented 
him on having justly drawn the character of 
a genuine lover. 



ENGLISH POETRY. 117 

Ten tragedies of Seneca were translated 
into English verse at different times and by- 
different authors before the year 1581. One 
of these translators was Alexander Ney- 
ville, afterwards secretary to Archbishop 
Parker, whose Oedipus came out as early as 
1560; and though he was but a youth of 
sixteen, his style has considerable beauty. 
The following lines, which open the first 
act, may serve as a specimen. 

" The night is gone, aud dreadful day begins at length 

t' appear, 
And Phcebus, all bedimm'd with clouds, himself aloft doth 

rear ; 
And, gliding forth, with deadly hue and doleful blaze in 

skies, 
Doth bear great terror and dismay to the beholder's 

eyes. 
JVow shall the houses void be seen, with plagues devoured 

quite, 
And slaughter, which the night hath made, shall day bring 

forth to light. 
Doth any man in princely thrones rejoice ? O brittle 

joy! 

How many ills, how fair a face, and yet how much annoy 
In thee doth lurk, and hidden lies what heaps of endless 

strife ! 
They judge amiss, that deem the Prince to have the 

happy life." 



118 ESSAY ON 

In 1568 was produced the tragedy of 
Tancred and Sigismunda, by Robert Wil- 
mot and four other students of the Inner 
Temple. It is reprinted in Reed's plays ; 
but that reprint is taken not from the first 
edition, but from one greatly polished and 
amended in 1592. Considered as a piece 
coming within the verge of Shakspeare's 
age, it ceases to be wonderful. Immedi- 
ately subsequent to these writers we meet 
with several obscure and uninteresting dra- 
matic names, among which is that of Whet- 
stone, 1 the author of Promos and Cassandra, 
in which piece there is a partial anticipa- 
sion of the plot of Shakspeare's Measure for 
Measure. Another is that of Preston, whose 
tragedy of Cambyses 2 is alluded to by 
Shakspeare, when Falstaff calls for a cup of 
sack, that he may weep " in King Camby- 
ses' vein." There is, indeed, matter for 
weeping in this tragedy ; for in the course 
of it, an elderly gentleman is flayed alive. 

1 The others are Garter, Wapel, and Wood . 

2 In the title-page it is denominated " A lamentable 
Tragedy, full of pleasant Mirth." 



ENGLISH POETRY. 119 

i 
To make the skinning more pathetic, his 

own son is witness to it, and exclaims, 

M What child is he of Nature's mould could bide the same 

to see, 
" His father fleaed in this sort ? O how it grieveth me !" 

It may comfort the reader to know that this 
theatric decortication was meant to be alle- 
gorical; and we may believe that it was 
performed w r ith no degree of stage illusion 
that could deeply affect the spectator. 

In the last twenty years of the sixteenth 
century, we come to a period when the 
increasing demand for theatrical entertain- 
ments produced play-writers by profession. 
The earliest of these appears to have been 
George Peeie, who was the city poet and 
conductor of the civil pageants. His " Ar- 
raignment of Paris" came out in 1 584. Nash 
calls him an Atlas in poetry. Unless we 
make allowance for his antiquity, the ex- 
pression will appear hyperbolical ; but, with 
that allowance, we may justly cherish the 
memory of Peele as the oldest genuine dra- 
matic poet of our language. His "David 



120 ESSAY ON 

and Bethsabe" is the earliest fountain of pa- 
thos and harmony that can be traced in our 
dramatic poetry. His fancy is rich and his 
feeling tender, and his conceptions of dra- 
matic character have no inconsiderable mix- 
ture of solid veracity and ideal beauty. — 
There is no such sweetness of versification 
and imagery to be found in our blank verse 
anterior to Shakspeare. David's character 
—the traits both of his guilt and sensibility 
— his passion for Bethsabe — his art in in- 
flaming the military ambition of Urias, and 
his grief for Absalom, are delineated with 
no vulgar skill. The luxuriant image of 
Bethsabe is introduced by these lines : 

Come, gentle Zephyr, trick >d with those perfumes 
That erst in Eden sweetenM Adam's love, 
And streak my bosom with thy gentle fan : 
This shade, sun-proof, is yet no proof for thee. 
Thy body, smoother than this waveiess spring, 
And purer than the substance of the same, 
Can creep through that his lances cannot pierce. 
Thou and thy sister, soft and sacred Air, 
Goddess of life, and governess of health, 
Keep every fountain fresh, and arbour sweet. 
No brazen gate ber passage can refuse, 
Nor bushy thicket bar thy subtle breath : 



ENGLISH POETRY. 121 

Then deck thee with thy loose delightsome robeg, 
And on thy wings bring delicate perfumes, 
To play the wanton with us through the leaves. 
David. What tones, what words, what looks, what 
wonders pierce 
My soul, incensed with a sudden fire? 
What tree, what shade, what spring, what paradise, 
Enjoys the beauty of so fair a dame ? 
Fair Eva, placed in perfect happiness, 
Lending her praise-notes to the liberal heavens, 
Wrought not more pleasure to her husband's thoughts, 
Than this fair woman's words and notes to mine. 
May that sweet plain, that bears her pleasant weight, 
Be still enameil'd with disco!our'd flowers ! 
That precious fount bear sand of purest gold ; 
And, for the pebble, let the silver streams 
Play upon rubies, sapphires, chrysolites ; 
The brims let be embraced with golden curls 
Of moss, that sleeps with sounds the waters make ; 
For joy to feed the fount with their recourse 
Let all the grass that beautifies her bower 
Bear manna every morn instead of dew. 

Joab thus describes the glory of David : 

Beauteous and bright is he among the tribes ; 
As when the sun, attir'd in glistering robe, 
Comes dancing from his oriental* gate, 
And, bridegroom-like, hurls through the gloomy air 
His radiant beams : such doth King David shew, 
Crown'd with the honour of his enemies' town, 
11 



122 ESSAY ON 

Shining in riches like the firmament, 

The starry vault that overhangs the earth ; 

So looketh David, King of Israel. 

At the conclusion of the tragedy, when 
David gives way to his grief for Absalom, 
he is roused with great dignity and energy 
by the speech of Joab. When informed by 
Joab of the death of his son, David ex- 
claims : 

David. Thou man of blood ! thou sepulchre of death ! 
Whose marble breast entombs my bowels quick, 
Did I not charge thee, nay, entreat thy hand, 
Even for my sake, to spare my Absalom ? 
And hast thou now, in spite of David's health, 
And scorn to do my heart some happiness, 
Given him the sword, and spilt his purple soul ? 

Joab. What ! irks it David, that he victor breathes. 
That Juda, and the fields of Israel 
Should cleanse their faces from their children's blood P 
What ! art thou weary of thy royal rule ? 
Is Israel's throne a serpent in thine eyes, 
And he that set thee there, so far from thanks, 
That thou must curse his servant for his sake? 
Hast thou not said, that, as the morning light, 
The cloudless morning, so should be thine house, 
And not as flowers, by the brightest rain, 
Which grow up quickly, and as quickly fade? 
Hast thou not said, the wicked are as thorns, 
That cannot be preserved with the hand ; 



ENGLISH POETRY. 123 

And that the man shall touch them must be armed 

With coats of iron, and garments made of steel ? 

And art thou angry he is now cut off, 

That led the guiltless swarming to their deaths, 

And was more wicked than an host of men ? 

Advance thee from thy melancholy den, 

And deck thy body with thy blissful robes, 

Or, by the Lord that sways the Heav'n, I swear, 

I'll lead thine armies to another King, 

Shall cheer them for their princely chivalry j 

And not sit daunted, frowning in the dark, 

When his fair looks, with wine and oil refresh'd, 

Should dart into their bosoms gladsome beams, 

And fill their stomachs with triumphant feasts ; 

That, when elsewhere stern War shall sound his trump, 

And call another battle to the. field, 

Fame still may bring thy valiant soldiers home, 

And for their service happily confess 

She wanted worthy trumps to sound their prowess; 

Take thou this course, and live j — Refuse, and die. 

Lyly, Kyd, Marlowe, Legge, Greene, and 
Lodge, were the other writers for our early 
stage, a part of whose career preceded that of 
Shakspeare. Lyly, whose dramatic language 
is prose, has traits of genius which we should 
not expect from his generally depraved taste, 
and he has several graceful interspersions 
of " sweet lyric song." But his manner, 



124 ESSAY ON 

on the whole, is stilted. " Brave Marlowe, 
bathed in the Thespian springs," of w r hose 
" mighty muse" Ben Jonson himself speaks 
reverentially, had powers of no ordinary 
class, and even ventured a few steps into 
the pathless sublime. But his pathos is 
dreary, and the terrors of his Muse remind 
us more of Minerva's gorgon than her coun- 
tenance. The first sober and cold school of 
tragedy, which began with Lord Sackville's 
Gorboduc, was succeeded by one of headlong 
extravagance. Kyd's bombast was prover- 
bial in his own day. With him the genius 
of tragedy might be said to have run mad ; 
and, if we may judge of one work, the joint 
production of Greene and Lodge, to have 
hardly recovered her wits in the company 
of those anthors. The piece to which I 
allude is entitled IC A Looking-glass for Lon- 
don." There, the Tamburlane of Kyd is 
fairly rivalled in rant and blasphemy by the 
hero Rasni, King of Nineveh, who boasts 

u Great Jewry's God, who foil'd great Benhadad, 
Could not rebate the strength that Rasni brought ; 



ENGLISH POETRY. 125 

For be he God in Heav'n, yet viceroys know 
Rasni is God on earth, and none but he." 

In the course of the play, the imperial swag- 
gerer marries his own sister, who is quite 
as consequential a character as himself ; but 
finding her struck dead by lightning, he 
deigns to espouse her lady-in-waiting, and is 
finally converted after his wedding, by Jo- 
nah, who soon afterwards arrives at Nine- 
veh. It would be perhaps unfair, however, 
to assume this tragedy as a fair test of the 
dramatic talents of either Greene or Lodge. 
Ritson recommended the dramas of Greene 
as well worthy of being collected. The 
taste of that antiquary was not exquisite, but 
his knowledge may entitle his opinion to 
consideration. 

Among these precursors of Shakspeare 
we may trace, in Peele and Marlowe, a 
pleasing dawn of the drama, though it was 
by no means a dawn corresponding to so 
bright a sunrise as the appearance of his 
mighty genius. He created our romantic 
drama, or if the assertion is to be qualified, 
11 * 



126 ESSAY ON 

it requires but a small qualification. There 
were undoubtedly prior occupants of the 
dramatic ground in our language ; bi»t they 
appear only like unprosperous settlers on 
the patches and skirts of a wilderness, which 
he converted into a garden. He is therefore 
never compared with his native predeces- 
sors. Criticism goes back for names worthy 
of being put in competition with his, to the 
first great masters of dramatic invention; 
and even in the points of dissimilarity be- 
tween them and him, discovers some of the 
highest indications of his genius. Compar- 
ed with the classical composers of antiquity, 
he is to our conceptions nearer the character 
of an universal poet ; more acquainted with 
man in the real world, and more terrific 
and bewitching in the preternatural. He 
expanded the magic circle of the drama 
beyond the limits that belonged to it in 
antiquity; made it embrace more time and 
locality, filled it with larger business and 
action, with vicissitudes of gay and serious 
emotion, which classical taste had kept di- 
vided; with characters which developed 



ENGLISH POETRY. 12? 

humanity in stronger lights and subtler 
movements, and with a language more 
wildly, more playfully diversified by fancy 
and passion, than was ever spoken on any 
stage. Like Nature herself, he presents 
alternations of the gay and the tragic ; and 
his mutability, like the suspense and pre- 
cariousness of real existence, often deepens 
the force of our impressions. He converted 
imitation into allusion. To say that, magi- 
cian as he was, he was not faultless, is only 
to recal the flat and stale truism, that every 
thing human is imperfect. But how to es- 
timate his imperfections! To praise him 
is easy — Infacili causa cuivis licet esse diserto 
— But to make a special, full, and accurate 
estimate of his imperfections would require 
a delicate and comprehensive discrimination, 
and an authority, which are almost as seldom 
united in one man as the powers of Shaks- 
peare himself. He is the poet of the world. 
The magnitude of his genius puts it beyond 
all private opinion so set defined limits to 
the admiration which is due to it. We 
know, upon the whole, that the sum of 



128 ESSAY ON 

blemishes to be deducted from his merits is 
Dot great, and we should scarcely be thank- 
ful to one who should be anxious to make 
it. No other poet triumphs so anomalously 
over eccentricities and peculiarities in com- 
position, which would appear blemishes in 
others ; so that his blemishes and beauties 
have an affinity which we are jealous of 
trusting any hand with the task of separat- 
ing. We dread the interference of criticism 
with a fascination so often inexplicable by 
critical laws, and justly apprehend that any 
man in standing between us and Shakspeare, 
may shew for pretended spots upon his disk, 
only the shadows of his own opacity. 

Still it is not a part even of that enthu- 
siastic creed, to believe that he has no ex- 
cessive mixture of the tragic and comic, no 
blemishes of language in the elliptical 
throng and impatient pressure of his images, 
no irregularities of plot and action, which 
another Shakspeare would avoid, if "nature 
had not broken the mould in which she made 
him," or if he should come back into the 
world to blend experience with inspiration. 



ENGLISH POETRY. 129 

The bare name of the dramatic unities is 
apt to excite revolting ideas of pedantry, 
arts of poetry, and French criticism. With 
none of these do I wish to annoy the read- 
er. I conceive that it may be said of those 
unities as of fire and water, that they are 
good servants but bad masters. In perfect 
rigour they were never imposed by the 
Greeks, and they would be still heavier 
shackles if they were closely rivetted on our 
own drama. It would be worse than useless 
to confine dramatic action literally and im- 
moveably to one spot, or its imaginary time 
to the time in which it is represented. On 
the other hand, dramatic time and place can- 
not surely admit of indefinite expansion.— 
It would be better, for the sake of illusion 
and probability, 1 to change the scene from 

1 Dr. Johnson has said, with regard to local unity in 
the drama, that we can as easily imagine ourselves in one 
place as another. So we can, at the beginning of a play y 
but having taken our imaginary station with the poet in 
one country, I do not believe with Dr. Johnson, that we 
change into a different one with perfect facility to the ima- 



130 ESSAY ON 

Windsor to London, than from London to Pe- 
kin ; it would look more like reality if a mes- 
senger, who went and returned in the course 
of the play, told us of having performed a jour- 
ney of ten or twenty, rather than of a thou- 
sand miles, and if the spectator had neither 
that nor any other circumstance to make 
him ask, how so much could be performed in 
so short a time. 

In an abstract view of dramatic art, its 
principles must appear to lie nearer to unity 
than to the opposite extreme of disunion, in 
our conceptions of time and place. Giving 
up the law of unity in its literal rigour, there 
is still a latitude of its application which 
may preserve proportion and harmony in 
the drama. 

The brilliant and able Schlegel has traced 
the principles of what he denominates the 
romantic, in opposition to the classical dra- 
ma; and conceives that Shakspeare's thea- 
tre, when tried by those principles, will be 

gination. Lay the first act in Europe, and we surely do 
not naturally expect to find the second in America. 



ENGLISH POETRY. 131 

found not to have violated any of the unities, 
if they are largely and liberally understood. 
I have no doubt that Mr. Schlegel's criti- 
cism will be found to have proved this point 
in a considerable number of the works of our 
mighty poet. There are traits, however, in 
Shakspeare, which, I must own, appear to 
my humble judgment incapable of being 
illustrated by any system or principles of 
art. I do not allude to his historical plays, 
which, expressly from being historical, may 
be called a privileged class. But in those 
of purer fiction, it strikes me that there are 
licenses conceded indeed to imagination"^ 
"charter'd libertine," but anomalous with 
regard to any thing which can be recognized 
as principles in dramatic art. When Per- 
dita, for instance, grows from the cradle to 
the marriage altar in the course of the play, 
I can perceive no unity in the design of the 
piece, and take refuge in the supposition of 
Shakspeare's genius triumphing and tramp- 
ling over art. Yet Mr. Schlegel, as far as I 
have observed, makes no exception to this 
breach of temporal unity 5 nor, in proving 



132 ESSAY ON 

Shakspeare a regular artist on a mighty 
scale, does he deign to notice this circum- 
stance, even as the ultima Thule of his 
license. If a man contends that dramatic 
laws are all idle restrictions, I can under- 
stand him ; or if he says that Perdita's 
growth on the stage is a trespass on art, but 
that Shakspeare's fascination over and over 
again redeems it, I can both understand and 
agree with him. But when I am left to 
infer that all this is right on romantic princi- 
ples, I confess that those principles become 
too romantic for my conception. If Perdita 
may be born and married on the stage, why 
may not Webster's Duchess of Malfy lie-in 
between the acts, and produce a fine family 
of tragic children ? Her Grace actually does 
so in Webster's drama, and he is a poet of 
some genius, though it is not quite so suffi- 
cient as Shakspeare's, to give a " sweet 
oblivious antidote" to such " perilous stuff." 
It is not, however, either in favour of Shaks- 
peare's or of Webster's genius that we shall be 
called on to make allowance, if we justify in 
the drama the lapse of such a number of 



ENGLISH POETRY. 133 

years as may change the apparent identity 
of an individual. If romantic unity is to be 
so largely interpreted, the old Spanish dra- 
mas, where youths grow gray-beards upon 
(he stage, the mysteries and moralities, and 
productions teeming with the wildest ana- 
chronism, might all come in with their grave 
or laughable claims to romantic legitimacy 

Nam sic 
Et Laberi nnraos ut pulcbra poeraata mirer. Hor. 

On a general view, I conceive it may be 
said, that Shakspeare nobly and legitimately 
enlarged the boundaries of time and place in 
the drama; but in extreme cases, I would 
rather agree with Cumberland, to waive all 
mention of his name in speaking of dramatic 
laws, than accept of those licenses for art 
which are not art, and designate irregularity 
by the name of order. 

There were other poets who started nearly 
coeval with Ben Jonson in the attempt to 
give a classical form to our drama. Daniel* 
for instance, brought out his tragedy of Cleo- 
patra in ]593; but his elegant genius wanted 
12 



134 ESSAY ON 

the strength requisite for great dramatic 
efforts. Still more unequal to the task was 
the Earl of Stirling, who published his cold 
" monarchic tragedies" in 1 504. The triumph 
of founding English classical comedy be- 
longed exclusively to Jonson. In his tra- 
gedies it is remarkable that he freely dispen- 
ses with the unities, though in those trage- 
dies he brings classical antiquity in the most 
distinct and learnedly authenticated traits 
before our eyes. The vindication of his 
great poetic memory forms an agreeable 
contrast in modern criticism with the bold 
bad things which used to be said of him in a 
former period; as when Young compared 
him to a blind Samson, who pulled down 
the ruins of antiquity on his head and buried 
his genius beneath them. Hurd, though he 
inveighed against the too abstract concep- 
tion of his characters, pronouncing them 
rather personified humours than natural be- 
ings, did him, nevertheless, the justice to 
quote one short and lovely passage from 
one of his masques, and the beauty of that 
passage probably turned the attention of 



ENGLISH POETRY, 135 

many readers to his then neglected compo- 
sitions. 1 It is indeed but one of the many 
beauties which justify all that has been said 
of Jonson's lyrical powers. In that fanciful 
region of the drama (the masque) he stands 
as pre-eminent as in comedy; or if he can 
be said to be rivalled, it is only by Milton. 
And our surprise at the wildness and sweet- 
ness of his fancy in one walk of composi- 
tion is increased by the stern and rigid 
(sometimes rugged) air of truth which he 
preserves in the other. In the regular drama 
he certainly holds up no romantic mirror to 

1 Namely, the song of Night, in the masque of " The 
Vision of Delight.'* 

" Break, Fhant'sie, from thy cave of cloud, 

And spread thy purple wings; 
Now all thy figures are allow'd, 

And various shapes of things; 
Create of airy forms a stream : 
It must have blood, and nought of phlegm, 
And though it be a waking dream, 
Yet let it like an odour rise 

To all the senses here, 
And fall like sleep upon their eyes, 

Or music in their ear." 



136 ESSAY ON 

nature. His object was to exhibit human 
characters at once strongly comic and 
severely and instructively true; to nourish 
the understanding, while he feasted the sense 
of ridicule. He is more anxious for veri- 
similitude than even for comic effect. He 
understood the humours and peculiarities of 
his species scientifically, and brought them 
forward in their greatest contrasts and subt- 
lest modifications. If Shakspeare carelessly 
scattered illusion, Jonson skilfully prepared 
it. This is speaking of Jonson in his hap- 
piest manner. There is a great deal of harsh 
and sour fruit in his miscellaneous poe'ry. 
It is acknowledged that in the drama he 
frequently overlabours his delineation of 
character, and wastes it tediously upon unin- 
teresting humours and peculiarities. He is 
a moral painter, who delights over much to 
shew his knowledge of moral anatomy. Be- 
yond the pale of his three great dramas, 
" The Fox," " The Epicene, or Silent Wo- 
man," and " The Alchymist," it would not 
be difficult to find many striking exceptions 
to that love of truth and probability, which, 



ENGLISH POETRY. 137 

in a general view, may be regarded as one 
of his best characteristics. Even within that 
pale, namely, in his masterly character of 
Volpone, one is struck with what, if it be 
not an absolute breach, is at least a very 
bold stretch, of probability. It is true that 
Volpone is altogether a being daringly con- 
ceived; and those who think that art spoilt 
the originality of Jonson, may well rectify 
their opinion by considering the force of 
imagination which it required to concentrate 
the traits of such a character as the Fox ; 
not to speak of his Mosca, who is the phoe- 
nix of all parasites. Volpone himself is not 
like the common misers of comedy, a mere 
money-loving dotard — a hard shrivelled old 
mummy, with no other spice than his ava- 
rice to preserve him; he is a happy villain, 
a jolly misanthrope — a little god in his own 
selfishness, and Mosca is his priest and pro- 
phet. Vigorous and healthy, though past 
the prime of life, he hugs himself in his arch 
humour, his successful knavery and impos- 
ture, his sensuality and his wealth, with an 
unhallowed relish of selfish existence. His 
12 * 



138 ESSAY ON 

passion for wealth seems not to be so great 
as his delight in gulling the human " vul- 
tures and gorecrows" who flock rouud him 
at the imagined approach of his dissolution; 
the speculators who put their gold, as they 
conceive, into his dying gripe, to be return- 
ed to them a thousand fold in his will. Yet 
still, after this exquisite rogue has stood his 
trial in a sweat of agony at the scruiineum, 
and blest his stars at having narrowly escap- 
ed being put to the torture, there is some- 
thing (one would think) a little too strong 
for probability, in that mischievous mirth 
and love of tormenting his own dupes, which 
bring him, by his own folly, a second time 
within the fangs of justice. The Fox and 
the Alchymist seem to have divided Jonson's 
admirers as to which of them may be con- 
sidered his masterpiece. In confessing my 
partiality to the prose comedy of " The 
Silent Woman," considered merely as a 
comedy, I am by no means forgetful of the 
rich eloquence which poetry imparts to the 
two others. But the Epicene, in my humble 
apprehension, exhibits Jonson's humour in 



ENGLISH POETRY. 139 

the most exhilarating perfection. With due 
admiration for the "Alchymist " I cannot 
help thinking the jargon of the chemical jug- 
glers, though it displays the learning of the 
author, to he tediously profuse. " The Fox" 
rises to something higher than comic effect. 
It is morally impressive. It detains us at 
particular points in serious terror and sus- 
pense. But the Epicene is purely facetious. 
I know not, indeed, why we should laugh 
more at the sufferings of Morose than at 
those of the sensualist Sir Epicure Mammon, 
who deserves his miseries much better than 
the rueful and pitiable Morose. Yet so it is, 
that, though the feelings of pathos and ridi- 
cule seem so widely different, a certain tinc- 
ture of the pitiable makes comic distress 
more irresistible. Poor Morose suffers what 
the fancy of Dante could not have surpassed 
in description, if he had sketched out a 
ludicrous purgatory. A lover of quiet — a 
man exquisitely impatient of rude sounds 
and loquacity, who lived in a retired street — 
who barricadoed his doors with mattresses to 
prevent disturbance to his ears, and who 



140 ESSAY ON 

married a wife because he could with diffi- 
culty prevail upon her to speak to hini — has 
hardly tied the fatal knot when his house is 
tempested by female eloquence, and the mar- 
riage of him who had pensioned the city 
wakes to keep away from his neighbourhood, 
is celebrated by a concert of trumpets. He 
repairs to a court of justice to get his mar- 
riage if possible dissolved, but is driven 
back in despair by the intolerable noise of 
the court. For this marriage how exqui- 
sitely we are prepared by the scene of court- 
ship. When Morose questions his intended 
bride about her likings and habits of life, she 
plays her part so hypocritically, that he 
seems for a moment impatient of her reserve, 
and with the most ludicrous cross feelings 
wishes her to speak more loudly, that he 
may have a proof of her tacHurnity from her 
own lips; but, recollecting himself, he gives 
way to the rapturous satisfaction of having 
found a silent woman, and exclaims to Cut- 
beard, " Go thy ways and get me a clergy- 
man presently, with a soft low voice, to 
marry us, and pray him he will not be im- 
pertinent, but brief as he can." 



ENGLISH POETRY. 141 

The art of Jonson was not confined to the 
cold observation of the unities of place and 
time, but appears in the whole adaptation of 
his incidents and characters to the support of 
each other. Beneath his learning and art 
he moves with an activity which may be 
compared to the strength of a man who can 
leap and bound under the heaviest armour. 

The works of Jonson briug us into the 
seventeenth century; and early in that cen- 
tury, our language, besides the great names 
already mentioned, contains many other 
poets whose works may be read with a plea- 
sure independent of the interest which we 
take in their antiquity. 

Drayton and Daniel, though the most 
opposite in the cast of their genius, are pre- 
eminent in the second poetical class of their 
age, for their common merit of clear and 
harmonious diction. Drayton is prone to 
Ovidian conceits, but he plays with them so 
gaily, that they almost seem to become him 
as if natural. His feeling is neither deep, 
nor is the happiness of his fancy of long con- 
tinuance, but its short April gleams are very 



142 ESSAY ON 

beautiful. His legend of the Duke of Buck- 
ingham opens with a fine description. Un- 
fortunately, his descriptions in long poems 
are, like many fine mornings, succeeded by 
a cloudy day. 

" The lark, that holds observance to the sun, 
Quaver'd her clear notes in the quiet air, 
And on the river's murmuring base did run, 
Whilst the pleas'd Heavens her fairest livery wear ; 
The place such pleasure gently did prepare, 
The flowers my smell, the flood my taste to steep, 
And the much softness lulled me asleep. 
When, in a vision, as it seemed to me, 
Triumphal music from the flood arose." 
********* 



Of the grand beauties of poetry he has 
none ; but of the sparkling lightness of his 
best manner an example may be given in 
the following stanzas, from his sketch of the 
Poet's Elysium. 

A Paradise on earth is found, 

Though far from vulgar sight, 

Which with those pleasures doth abound, 

That it Elysium hight. 
******* 



ENGLISH POETRY. 143 

The winter here a summer is, 

No waste is made by time ; 
Nor doth the autumn ever miss 

The blossoms of the prime. 

'f* rt* *I* *f* 3f» ^f* T« 

Those cliffs whose craggy sides are clad 

With trees of sundry suits, 
Which make continual summer glad, 

Ev'n bending with their fruits — 

Some ripening, ready some to fall, 

Some blossom'd, some to bloom, 
Like gorgeous hangings on the wall 

Of some rich princely room. 
* * * * * * * 

There, in perpetual summer shade, 

Apollo's prophets sit, 
Among the flowers that never fade, 

But flourish like their wit j 

To whom the nymphs, upon their lyres, 

Tune many a curious lay, 
And, with their most melodious quires, 

Make short the longest day. 



Daniel is " somewhat aflat" as one of his 
contemporaries said of him, but he had more 
sensibility than Drayton, and his moral re- 
flection rises to higher dignity. The lyrical 



144 ESSAY ON 

poetry of Elizabeth's age runs often info 
pastoral insipidity and fantastic carelessness, 
though there may be found in some of the 
pieces of Sir Philip Sydney, Lodge, Mar- 
lowe, and Breton, not only a sweet wild 
spirit, but an exquisite finish of expression. 
Of these combined beauties Marlowe's song, 
" Come live with me, and be my love," is an 
example. The Soul's Errand, by whomso- 
ever it was written, is a burst of genuine 
poetry. 1 I know not how that short produc- 
tion has ever affected other readers, but it 
carries to my imagination an appeal which I 
cannot easily account for from a few simple 
rhymes. It places the last and inexpressibly 
awful hour of existence before my view, and 
sounds like a sentence of vanity on the 
things of this world, pronounced by a dying 
man, whose eye glares on eternity, and 
whose voice is raised by strength from ano- 
ther world. 2 Raleigh, also (according to 

1 Vide Specimens of the British Poets ; — by J. Camp- 
bell. Vol. II. p. 220. ^London edition.') 

2 Is not the Soul's Errand the same poem with the 
Soul's Knell, which is always ascribed to Richard Ed- 



ENGLISH POETRY. 145 

Puttenham,) had a "lofty and passionate" 
vein. It is difficult, however, to authenti- 
cate his poetical relics. Of the numerous 
sonuetteers of that time (keeping Shaks- 
peare and Spenser apart) Drummond and 
Daniel are certainly the best. Hall was the 
master satirist of the age ; obscure and quaint 
at times, but full of nerve and picturesque 
illustration. No contemporary satirist has 
given equal grace and dignity to moral cen- 
sure. Very unequal to him in style, though 
often as original in thought, and as graphic 
in exhibiting manners, is Donne, some of 
whose satires have been modernized by Pope. 
(5orbet has left some humorous pieces of 
raillery on the Puritans. Withers, all fierce 
and fanatic on the opposite side, has nothing 
more to recommend him in invective, than 
the sincerity of that zeal for God's house, 
which eat him up. Marston, better known 
in the drama than in satire, was characteriz- 
ed by his contemporaries for his ruffian style. 

wards?— If so, why has it been inserted in Raleigh's 
poems by their last editor? 
13 



146 ESSAY ON 

He has more will than skill in invective. 
" He puts in his blows with love" as the pugi- 
lists say of a hard but artless fighter ; a de- 
grading image, but on that account not the 
less applicable to a coarse satirist. 

Donne was the " best good-natured man, 
with the worst-natured Muse." A romantic 
and uxorious lover, he addresses the object of 
his real tenderness with ideas that outrage 
decorum. He begins his ow r n epithalamium 
with a most indelicate invocation to his 
bride. His ruggedness and whim are almost 
proverbially known. Yet there is a beauty 
of thought which at intervals rises from his 
chaotic imagination, like the form of Venus 
smiling on the waters. Giles and Phineas 
Fletcher possessed harmony and fancy. The 
simple Warner has left, in his "ArgentHe 
and Curan," perhaps the finest pastoral epi- 
sode in our language. Brown was an ele- 
gant describer of rural scenes, though incom- 
petent to fill them with life and manners. 
Chalkhill 1 is a writer of pastoral romance, 

1 Chalkhill was a gentleman and a scholar, the friend 
of Spenser. He died before he could finish the fable of 



ENGLISH POETRY. 14? 

from whose work of Thealma and Clearchus 
a specimen should have been given in the 
body of the Selections, but was omitted by 
an accidental oversight. Chalkhill's num- 
bers are as musical as those of any of his 
contemporaries, who employ the same form 
of versification. It was common with the 
writers of the heroic couplet of that age, to 
bring the sense to a full and frequent pause 
in the middle of the line. This break, by 
relieving the uniformity of the couplet mea- 
sure, sometimes produces a graceful effect 
and a varied harmony, which we miss in the 
exact and unbroken tune of our later rhyme ; 
a beauty of which the reader will probably 
be sensible, in perusing such lines of Chalk- 
hill's as these — 

"And ever and anon he might well hear 
A sound of music steal in at his ear, 
As the wind gave it being. So sweet an air 
Would strike a siren mute ." 

This relief, however, is used rather too libe- 
rally by the elder rhymists, and is perhaps 

his Thealma and Clearchus, which was published, long 
after his death, by Isaac AValton. 



148 ESSAY ON 

as often the result of their carelessness as of 
their good taste. Nor is it at all times ob- 
tained by them without the sacrifice of one 
of the most important uses of rhyme; namely, 
the distinctness of its effect in marking the 
measure. The chief source of the gratifica- 
tion which the ear finds in rhyme is our per- 
ceiving the emphasis of sound coincide with 
that of sense. In other words, the rhyme is 
best placed on the most emphatic word in 
the sentence. But it is nothing unusual with 
the ancient couplet writers, by laying the 
rhyme on unimportant words, to disappoint 
the ear of this pleasure, and to exhibit the 
restraint of rhyme without its emphasis. 

As a poetical narrator of fiction, Chalkhill 
is rather tedious ; but he atones for the slow 
progress of his narrative by many touches of 
rich and romantic description. 



DESCRIPTION OF THE PRIESTESS OF DIANA 



FROM THEALMA AND CLEARCHUS. 



Within a little silent grove hard by, 
Upon a small ascent, he might espy 



ENGLISH POETRY. 149 

A stately chapel, richly gilt without, 

Beset with shady sycamores about ; 

And ever and anon he might well hear 

A sound of music steal in at his ear, 

As the wind gave it being. So sweet an air 

Would strike a siren mute, and ravish her. 

He sees no creature that might cause the same, 

But he was sure that from the grove it came, 

And to the grove he goes to satisfy 

The curiosity of ear and eye. 

Thorough the thick-leav'd boughs he makes a way, 

Nor could the scratching brambles make him stay, 

But on he rushes, and climbs up a hill, 

Thorough a glade. He saw and heard his fill — 

A hundred virgins there he might espy, 

Prostrate before a marble deity, 

Which, by its portraiture, appear'd to be 

The image of Diana. On their knee 

They tended their devotions with sweet airs, 

Offering the incense of their praise and prayers, 

Their garments all alike * * * 

r*C *ft *ft *|C 5jC T" ^ ^* T* 

And cross their snowy silken robes they wore 
An azure scarf, with stars embroidered o'er ; 
Their hair in curious tresses was knot up, 
Crown'd with a silver crescent on the top ; 
A silver bow their left hand held, their right, 
For their defence, held a sharp headed flight 
Of arrows. ***** 
Under their vestments, something short before, 
White buskins, laced with ribbanding, they wore j 
13 * 



150 ESSAY ON 

It was a catching sight to a young eye, 

That Love had fixM before. He might espy 

One whom the rest had, sphere-like, circled round, 

Whose head was with a golden chaplet crown'd : 

He could not see her face, only his ear 

"Was blest with the sweet words that came from her. 



THE IMAGE OF JEALOUSY IN THE CHAPEL 
OP DIANA. 

* *..-.''* * A curious eye 

Might see some relics of a piece of art 

That Psyche made, when Love first fir'd her heart ; 

It was the story of her thoughts, that she 

Curiously wrought in lively imagery; 

Among the rest she thought of Jealousy, 

Time left nntouch'd to grace antiquity, 

She was decypher'd by a tim'rous dame, 

Wrapt in a yellow mantle lin'd with flame; 

Her looks were pale, contracted with a frown, 

Her eyes suspicious, wandering up and down j 

Behind her Fear attended, big with child, 

Able to fright Presumption if she smil'd; 

After her flew a sigh between two springs 

Of briny waters. On her dove-like wings 

She bore a letter seal'd with a half moon, 

And superscribed— this from Suspicion. 



ENGLISH POETRY. 151 



ABODE OF THE WITCH ORANDRA. 

Her cell was hewn out in the marble rock 
By more than human art. She need not knock — 
The door stood always open, large and wide, 
Grown o'er with woolly moss ou either side, 
And interwove with ivy's flattering twines, 
Through which the carbuncle and diamond shines ; 
Not set by art, but there by Nature sown 
At the world's birth ; so starlike bright they shone, 
They serv'd instead of tapers, to give light 
To the dark entry. * * * * 

* * * * * In they went : 

The ground was strewn with flowers, whose sweet scent, 
Mixt with the choice perfumes from India brought, 
Intoxicates his brains, and quickly caught 
His credulous sense. The walls were gilt, and set 
With precious stones, and all the roof was fret 
With a gold vine, whose straggling branches spread 
O'er all the arch — the swelling grapes were red j 
This art had made of rubies, cluster'd so, 
To the quickest eye they more than seem'd to grow. 
About the walls lascivious pictures hung, 
Such as whereof loose Ovid sometimes sung ; 
On either side a crew of dwarfish elves 
Held waxen tapers taller than themselves, 
Yet so well shaped unto their little stature, 
So angel-like in face, so sweet in feature, 
Their rich attire so differing, yet so well 
Becoming her that wore it, none could tell 



152 ESSAY ON 

Which was the fairest. * * * 

After a low salute they all 'gan sing, 

And circle in the stranger in a ring ; 

Orandra to her charms was stept aside, 

Leaving her guest half won, and wanton ey'd : 

He had forgot his herb — cunning delight 

Had so bewitch'd his ears, and blearM his sight, 

That he was not himself. * ' * * 

***** Unto his view 

She represents a banquet, usher'd in 

By such a shape as she was sure would win 

His appetitite to taste — so like she was 

To his Clarinda both in shape and face, 

So voiced, so habited — of the same gait 

And comely gesture. * * * 

* * * Hardly did he refrain 
From sucking in destruction at her lip ; 
Sin-s cup will poison at the smallest sip. 
She weeps and woes again with subtleness, 
And with a frown she chides his backwardness : 
Have you (said she) sweet prince, so soon forgot 
Your own belovM Clarinda ? Are you not 
The same you were, that you so slightly set 

By her that once you made the cabinet 

Of your choice counsel ? Hath some worthier love 

Stole your affections ? What is it should move 

You to dislike so soon ? Must I still taste 

No other dish but sorrow ? When we last 

Emptied our souls into each other's breast, 

It was not so. * * * 

* * » ' With that she wept afresh * * 



ENGLISH POETRY. 153 

* * She seem'd to fall into a swound ; 
And stooping down to raise her from the ground, 
He puts his herb into his mouth, whose taste 
Soon changed his mind : he lifts her — but in vain, 
His hands fell off, and she fell down again : 
With that she lent him such a frown as would 
Have kill'd a common lover, and made cold 
Even lust itself. * * * * 

* * * The lights went out, 

A.nd darkness hung the chamber round about : 
A yelling, hellish noise was each where heard. 

In classical translation Phaer and Gold- 
ing were the earliest successors of Lord 
Surrey. Phaer published his Virgil in 1562, 
and Golding his Ovid three years later. — 
Both of these translators, considering the 
state of the language, have considerable 
merit. Like them, Chapman, who came 
later, employed in his version of the Iliad 
the fourteen syllable rhyme, which was 
then in favourite use. Of the three transla- 
tors, Phaer is the most faithful and simple, 
Golding the most musical, and Chapman 
the most spirited ; though Chapman is prone 
to the turgid, and often false to the sense of 
Homer. Phaer's iEneid has been praised by 
a modern writer, in the " Lives of the Ne- 



154 ESSAY ON 

phews of Milton," with absurd exaggera- 
tion. I have no wish to disparage the fair 
value of the old translator, but when the bi- 
ographer of Milton's nephews declares, 
" that nothing in language or conception can 
exceed the style in which Phaer treats of 
the last day of the existence of Troy," I 
know of no answer to this assertion but to 
give the reader the very passage, which is 
pronounced so inimitable— although, to save 
myself farther impediment in the text, I 
must subjoin it in a note. 1 

1 ENEAS's NARRATIVE AFTER THE DEATH 
OF PRIAM. 

ANEID II. 

Than first the cruel fear me caught, and sore my sprites 

appall'd, 
And on my father dear I thought, his face to mind I called, 
Whan slain with grisly wound our king, him like of age in 

sight, 
Lay gasping dead, and of my wife Creuse bethought the 

plight. 
Alone, forsake, my house despoiled, my child what chaunce 

had take, 
I looked, and about me view'd what strength I might me 

make. 



ENGLISH POETRY. 155 

The harmony of Fairfax is justly cele- 
brated. Joshua Sylvester's version of the 

All men had ine forsake for paynes, and dcwn their bodies 

drew, 
To ground they leapt, and some for woe themselves iu 

fires they threw. 
And now alone was left but I whan Vesta's Temple stair 
To keep and secretly to lurk all crouching close in chair, 
Dame Helen I might see to sit ; bright burnings gave me 

light, 
Wherever I went, the ways I pass'd, all thing was set in 

sight. 
She fearing her the Trojans wrath, for Troy destroy'd to 

wreke, 
Greek's torments and her husband's force, whose wedlock 

she did break, 
The plague of Troy and of her country, monster most on- 
tame, 
There sat she with her hated head, by the altars hid for 

shame. 
Straight in my breast I felt a fire, deep wrath my heart 

did strain, 
My country's fall to wreak, and bring that cursed wretch 

to pain. 
What ! shall she into her country soil of Sparta and high 

Mycene, 
All safe shall she return, and there on Troy triumph as 

queen ? 
Her hnsband, children, country, kynne, her house, her par- 
ents old, 



156 ESSAY ON 

" Divine Weeks and Works" of the French 
poet Dubartas, was among the most popular 

With Trojan wives, and Trojan lords, her slaves shall she 

behold ? 
Was Priam slain with sword for this ? Troy burnt with 

fire so wood ? 
Is it herefore that Dardan strondes so often hath sweat 

with blood? 
Not so, for though it be no praise on woman kind to 

wreak, 
And honour none there lieth in this, nor name for men to 

speak ; 
Yet quench I shall this poison here, and due deserts to 

dight, 
Men shall commend my zeal, and ease my mind I shall 

outright : 
This much for all my people's bones and country's flame 

to quite. 
These things within myself I tost, and fierce with force I 

ran, 
Whan to my face my mother great, so brim no time till 

than, 
Appearing shew\J herself in sight, all shining pure by 

night. 
Right goddess-like appearing, such as heavens beholds her 

bright. 
So great with majesty she stood, and me by right-hand 

take, 
She stay'd, and red as rose, with mouth these words to me 

s»he spake : 



ENGLISH POETRY. 157 

of our early translations ; and the obliga- 
tions which Milton is alleged to have owed 

My son, what sore outrage so wild thy wrathful mind up- 

staresP 
Why frettest thou, or where alway from us thy care with- 
drawn appears ? 
Nor first unto thy father see'st, whom, feeble in all this 

woe, 
Thou hast forsake, nor, if thy wife doth live, thou know'st 

or no, 
Nor young Ascanius, thy child, whom throngs of Greeks 

about 
Doth swarming run, and, were not my relief, withouten 

doubt 
By this time flames had by devoured, or swords of eu'mies 

kill'd. 
It is not Helen's fate of Greece this town, my son, hath 

spill'd, 
Nor Paris is to blame for this, but Gods, with grace un- 
kind, 
This wealth hath overthrown, a Troy from top to ground 

outwind. 
Behold ! for now away the cloud aud dim fog will I take, 
That over mortal eyes doth hang, and blind thy sight doth 

make; 
Thou to thy parents haste, take heed (dread not) my mind 

obey. 
In yonder place, where stones from stones, and buildings 

huge to sway, 
Thou seest, and mixt in dust and smoke, thick streams of 

richness rise, 

14 



158 ESSAY ON 

to it, have revived Sylvester's name with 
some interest in modern criticism. Sylves- 
ter was a puritan, and so was the publisher 
of his work, Humphrey Lownes, who lived 
in the same street with Milton's father; 
and from the congeniality of their opinions, 
it is not improbable that they might be ac- 
quainted. It is easily to be conceived that 
Milton often repaired to the shop of Lownes, 
and there first met with the pious didactic 
poem. Lauder was the earliest to trace 
Milton's particular thoughts and expressions 
to Sylvester; and, as might be expected, 
maliciously exaggerated them. Later wri- 
ters took up the subject with a very differ- 

Himself the God Neptune that side doth turn in wonders 

wise, 
W r ith fork three tiu'd the walls uproots, foundations all 

too shakes, 
And quite from under soil the town with ground-works all 

uprakes. 
On yonder side, with furies inixt, Dame Juno fiercely 

stands. 
The gate she keeps, and from their ships the Greeks, her 

friendly bands, 
In armour girt, she calls. 



ENGLISH POETRY. 159 

ent spirit. Mr. Todd, the learned editor of 
Spenser, noticed in a number of the Gen- 
tlemen's Magazine, 1 the probability of Mil- 
ton's early acquaintance with the translation 
of Dubartas's poem; and Mr. Dunster has 
since, in his " Essay on Milton's early read- 
ing? supported the opinion, that the same 
work contains the prima stamina of Paradise 
Lost, and laid the first foundation of that 
" monumentum cere perennins" Thoughts 
and expressions there certainly are in Mil- 
ton, which leave his acquaintance with Syl- 
vester hardly questionable; although some 
of the expressions quoted by Mr. Dunster, 
which are common to them both, may be 
traced back to other poets older than Syl- 
vester. The entire amount of his obliga- 
tions, as Mr. Dunster justly admits, cannot 
detract from our opinion of Milton. If Syl- 
vester ever stood high in his favour, it must 
have been when he was very young. The 
beauties which occur, so strangely intermix- 
ed with bathos and flatness in Sylvester's 

1 For November 1796, 



160 ESSAY ON 

poem, might have caught the youthful dis- 
cernment, and long dwelt in the memory, of 
the great poet. But he must have perused 
it with disgust at Sylvester's general man- 
ner. Many of his epithets and happy 
phrases were really worthy of Milton ; but 
by far the greater proportion of his thoughts 
and expressions have a quaintness and flat- 
ness more worthy of Quarles and Withers. 

The following lines may serve as no un- 
favourable specimens of his translation of 
Dubartas's poem. 

PROBABILITY OF THE CELESTIAL ORBS 
BEING INHABITED. 

I not believe that the great architect 

With all these fires the heavenly arches deck'd 

Only for shew, and with these glistering shields 

T' amaze poor shepherds, watching in the fields ; 

I not believe that the least flow'r which pranks 

Our garden borders, or our common banks, 

And the least stone, that in her warming lap 

Our mother earth doth covetously wrap, 

Hath some peculiar virtue of its own, 

And that the glorious stars of heav'n have none. 



ENGLISH POETRY. 161 



THE SERPENT'S ADDRESS TO EVE WHEN 
HE TEMPTED HER IN EDEN. 



As a false lover, that thick snares hath laid 
T' entrap the honour of a fair young maid, 
If she (though little) list'niog ear affords 
To his sweet-courting, deep-affecting words, 
Feels some assuaging of his ardent flame, 
And sooths himself with hopes to win his game, 
While, wrapt with joy, he on his point persists, 
That parleying city never long resists — 
Even so the serpent. * * * 

Perceiving Eve his flattering gloze digest, 
He prosecutes, and jocund doth not rest. 
No, Fair, (quoth he) believe not that the care 
God hath from spoiling Death mankind to spare 
Makes him forbid you, on such strict condition, 
His purest, rarest, fairest fruit's fruition. 
********* 

Begin thy bliss, and do not fear the threat 
Of an uncertain Godhead, only great 
Through self-aw'd zeal— put on the glistening pall 
Of immortality. 



MORNING. 

Arise betimes, while th 1 opal-colourd morn 
In golden pomp doth May-day's door adorn, 

14* 



162 ESSAY ON 

The " opalcolour'd morn" is a beautiful 
expression, that I do not remember any oth- 
er poet to have ever used. 

The school of poets which is commonly 
called the metaphysical, began in the reign 
of Elizabeth with Donne ; but the term of 
metaphysical poetry would apply with much 
more justice to the quatrains of Sir John 
Davies, and those of Sir Fulke Greville, 
writers who, at a later period, found imita- 
tors in Sir Thomas Overbury and Sir Wil- 
liam Davenant. Davies's poem on the Im- 
mortality of the Soul, entitled " Nosce teip- 
$nm" will convey a much more favourable 
idea of metaphysical poetry than the witti- 
est effusions of Donne and his followers. — 
Davies carried abstract reasoning into verse 
with an acuteness and felicity which have 
seldom been equalled. He reasons, un- 
doubtedly, with too much labour, formality, 
and subtlety, to afford uniform poetical plea- 
sure. The generality of his stanzas exhib- 
it hard arguments interwoven with the pli- 
ant materials of fancy so closely, that we 
may compare them to a texture of cloth and 



ENGLISH POETRY. 163 

metallic threads, which is cold and stiff, 
while it is splendidly curious. There is 
this difference, however, between Davies 
and the commonly styled metaphysical poets, 
that he argues like a hard-thinker, and they, 
for the most part, like madmen. If we con- 
quer the drier parts of Davies's poem, aud 
bestow a little attention on thoughts which 
were meant, not to gratify the indolence, but 
to challenge the activity, of the mind, we 
shall find in the entire essay fresh beauties 
at every perusal : for in the happier parts we 
come to logical truths so well illustrated by 
ingenious similes, that we know not whether 
to call the thoughts more poetically or phi- 
losophically just. The judgment and fancy 
are reconciled, and the imagery of the poem 
seems to start more vividly from the sur- 
rounding shades of abstraction. 

Such were some of the first and inferior 
luminaries of that brilliant era of our poetry, 
which, perhaps, in general terms, may be 
said to cover about the last quarter of the 
sixteenth, and the first quarter of the seven- 
teenth, century ; and which, though com- 



164 ESSAY ON 

monly called the age of Elizabeth, compre- 
hends many writers belonging to the reign 
of her successor. The romantic spirit, the 
generally unshackled style, and the fresh 
and fertile genius of that period, are not to 
be called in question. On the other hand, 
there are defects in the poetical character 
of the age, which, though they may disap- 
pear or be of little account, amidst the ex- 
cellencies of its greatest writers, are glaring- 
ly conspicuous in the works of their minor 
contemporaries. In prolonged narrative and 
description, the writers of that age are pe- 
culiarly deficient in that charm, which is 
analogous to " keeping''* in pictures. Their 
warm and cold colours are generally with- 
out the gradations which should make them 
harmonize. They fall precipitately from 
good to bad thoughts, from strength to im- 
becility. Certainly they are profuse in the 
detail of natural circumstances, and in the 
utterance of natural feelings. For this we 
love them, and we should love them still 
more, if they knew where to stop in descrip- 
tion and sentiment. But they give out the 



ENGLISH POETRY. 165 

dregs of their mind without reserve, till 
their fairest conceptions are overwhelmed 
by a rabble of mean associations. At no 
period is the mass of vulgar mediocrity in 
poetry marked by more formal gallantry, by 
grosser adulation, or by coarser satire. Our 
amatory strains in the time of Charles the 
Second may be more dissolute, but those of 
Elizabeth's age often abound in studious and 
prolix licentiousness. Nor are examples of 
this solemn and sedate impurity to be found 
only in the minor poets ': our reverence for 
Shakspeare himself need not make it neces- 
sary to disguise that he willingly adopted 
that style in his youth, when be wrote his 
Venus and Adonis. 

The fashion of the present day is to solicit 
public esteem not only for the best and 
better, but for the humblest and meanest 
writers of the age of Elizabeth. It is a bad 
book which has not something good in it; 
and even some of the worst writers of that 
period have their twinkling beauties. In 
one point of view, the research among such 
obscure authors is undoubtedly useful. It 



166 ESSAY ON 

tends to throw incidental lights on the great 
old poets, and on the manners, biography, 
and language of the country. So far all is 
well — but as a matter of taste, it is apt to 
produce illusion and disappointment. Men 
like to make the most of the slightest beauty 
which they can discover in an obsolete ver- 
sifier; and they quote perhaps the solitary 
good thought which is to be found in such a 
writer, omitting any mention of the dreary 
passages which surround it. Of course it 
becomes a lamentable reflection, that so va- 
luable an old poet should have been forgot- 
ten. When the reader however repairs to 
him, he finds that there are only one or two 
grains of gold in all the sands of this imagi- 
nary Pactolus. But the display of neglected 
authors has not been even confined to glim- 
mering beauties ; it has been extended to 
the reprinting of large and heavy masses of 
dulness. Most wretched works have been 
praised in this enthusiasm for the obsolete ; 
even the dullest works of the meanest con- 
tributors to the kt Mirror for Magistrates." 
It seems to be taken for granted, that the 



ENGLISH POETRY. 16? 

inspiration of the good old times descended 
to the very lowest dregs of its versifiers; 
whereas the bad writers of Elizabeth's age 
are only more stiff and artificial than those 
of the preceding, and more prolix than those 
of the succeeding period. 

Yet there are men who, to all appearance, 
would wish to revive such authors — not for 
the mere use of the antiquary, to whom 
every volume may be useful, but as standards 
of manner, and objects of general admiration. 
Books, it is said, take up little room. In the 
library this may be the case ; but it is not 
so in the minds and time of those who peruse 
them. Happily indeed, the task of pressing 
indifferent authors on the public attention is 
a fruitless one. They may be dug up from 
oblivion, but life cannot be put into their 
their reputations. i( Can these bones live ?" 
Nature will have her course, and dull books 
will be forgotten in spite of bibliographers. 



PART III, 



A he pedantic character of James I. has 
been frequently represented as the cause of 
degeneracy in English taste and genius. It 
must be allowed that James was an indiffe- 
rent author ; and that neither the manners of 
his court nor the measures of his reign were 
calculated to excite romantic virtues in his 
subjects. But the opinion of his character 
having influenced the poetical spirit of the 
age unfavourably, is not borne out by facts. 
He was friendly to the stage and to its best 
writers: he patronized Ben Jonson, and is 
said to have written a complimentary letter 
to Shakspeare with his own hand. 1 We 
may smile at the idea of James's praise 

1 This anecdote is given by Oldys on the authority of 
the Duke of Buckingham, who had it from Sir William 
Davenant. 

15 



170 ESSAY ON 

being bestowed as an honour upon Shaks- 
peare ; the importance of the compliment, 
however, is not to be estimated by our pre- 
sent opinion of the monarch, but by the ex- 
cessive reverence with which royalty was 
at that time invested in men's opinions. 
James's reign was rich in poetical names, 
some of which have been already enume- 
rated. We may be reminded, indeed, that 
those poets had been educated under Eliza- 
beth, and that their genius bore the high 
impress of her heroic times ; but the same 
observation will also oblige us to recollect 
that Elizabeth's age had its traits of depraved 
fashion (witness its Euphuism,) 1 and that the 
first examples of the worst taste which ever 
infected our poetry were given in her days, 
and not in those of her successor. Donne 
(for instance) the patriarch of the metaphy- 
sical generation, was thirty years of age at 
the date of James's accession; a time at 

1 An affected jargon of style, which was fashionable for 
some time at the court of Elizabeth, and so called from 
the work of Lyly entitled Euphues* 



ENGLISH POETRY. 171 

-which his taste and style were sufficiently 
formed to acquit his learned sovereign of all 
blame in having corrupted them. Indeed, 
if we were to make the memories of our 
kings accountable for the poetical faults of 
their respective reigns, we might reproach 
Charles the First, among whose faults bad 
taste is certainly not to be reckoned, with 
the chief disgrace of our metaphysical poet- 
ry ; since that school never attained its un- 
natural perfection so completely as in the 
luxuriant ingeuuity of Cowley's fancy, and 
the knotted deformity of Cleveland's. For 
a short time after the suppression of the 
theatres till the time of Milton, the meta- 
physical poets are forced upon our attention 
for want of better objects. But during 
James's reign there is no such scarcity of 
good writers as to oblige us to dwell on the 
school of elaborate conceit. Phineas Fletch- 
er has been sometimes named as an instance 
of the vitiated taste which prevailed at this 
period. He, however, though musical and 
fanciful, is not to be admitted as a represen- 
tative of the poetical character of those 



172 ESSAY ON 

times, which included Jonson, Beaumont 
and John Fletcher, Ford, Massinger, and 
Shirley. Shakspeare was no more; but 
there were dramatic authors of great and 
diversified ability. The romantic school of 
the drama continued to be more popular than 
the classical, though in the latter Ben Jon- 
son lived to see imitators of his own manner, 
whom he was not ashamed to adopt as his 
poetical heirs. Of these Cartwright and 
Randolph were the most eminent. The ori- 
ginality of Cartwright's plots is always ac- 
knowledged ; and Jonson used to say of him, 
"My son Cartwright writes all like a man" 
Massinger is distinguished for the harmony 
and dignity of his dramatic eloquence. Many 
of his plots, it is true, are liable to heavy 
exceptions. The fiends and angels of his 
Virgin Martyr are unmanageable tragic ma- 
chinery; and the incestuous passion of his 
Ancient Admiral excites our horror. The 
poet of love is driven to a frightful expe- 
dient, when he gives it the terrors of a ma- 
niac passion, breaking down the most sacred 
pale of instinct and consanguinity. The 



ENGLISH POETRY. 173 

ancient admiral is in love wilh his own 
daughter. Such a being, if we fancy him to 
exist, strikes us as no object of moral warn- 
ing, but as a man under the influence of in- 
sanity. In a general view, nevertheless, Mas- 
singer has more art and judgment in the 
serious drama than any of the other succes- 
sors of Shakspeare. His incidents are less 
entangled than those of Fletcher, and the 
scene of his action is more clearly thrown 
open for the free evolution of character. 
Fletcher strikes the imagination with 
more vivacity, but more irregularly, and 
amidst embarrassing positions of his own 
choosing. Massinger puts forth his strength 
more collectively. Fletcher has more action 
and character in his drama, and leaves a 
greater variety of impressions upon the mind. 
Kis fancy is more volatile and surprising, 
but then he often blends disappointment 
with our surprise, and parts with the consis- 
tency of his characters even to the occa- 
sionally apparent loss of their identity. This 
is not the case with Massinger. It is true 
that Massinger excels more in description 
15 * 



174 ESSAY ON 

and declamation than in the forcible utter- 
ance of the heart, and in giving character 
the warm colouring of passion. Still, not to 
speak of his one distinguished hero 1 in 
comedy, he has delineated several tragic 
characters with strong and interesting traits. 
They are chiefly proud spirits. Poor him- 
self, and struggling under the rich man's 
contumely, we may conceive it to have 
been the solace of his neglected existence 
to picture worth and magnanimity breaking 
through external disadvantages, and making 
their way to love and admiration. Hence 
his fine conceptions of Paris, the actor, ex- 
citing by the splendid endowments of his 
nature the jealousy of the tyrant of the 
world ; and Don John and Pysander, habi- 
ted as slaves, wooing and winning their 
princely mistresses. Ete delighted to shew 
heroic virtue stripped of all adventitious cir- 
cumstances, and tried, like a gem, by its 
shining through darkness. His Duke of 
Milan is particularly admirable for the blend- 

1 Sir Giles Overreach. 



ENGLISH POETRY. 175 

ed interest which the poet excites by the 
opposite weaknesses and magnanimity of 
the same character. Sforza, Duke of Milan, 
newly married and uxoriously attached to 
the haughty Marcelia, a woman of exquisite 
attractions, makes her an object of secret 
but deadly enmity at his court, by the extra- 
vagant homage which he requires to be paid 
to her, and the precedence which he enjoins 
even his own mother and sisters to yield 
her. As Chief of Milan, he is attached to 
the fortunes of Francis the First. The 
sudden tidings of the approach of Charles 
the Fifth, in the campaign which terminated 
with the battle of Pavia, soon afterwards 
spread dismay through his court and capital. 
Sforza, though valiant and self-collected in 
all that regards the warrior or politician, is 
hurried away by his immoderate passion for 
Marcelia; and being obliged to leave her 
behind, but unable to bear the thoughts of 
her surviving him, obtains the promise of a 
confidant to destroy her, should his own 
death appear inevitable. He returns to his 
capital in safety. Marcelia, having dig- 



176 ESSAY ON 

covered the secret order, receives him with 
coldness. His jealousy is inflamed; and her 
perception of that jealousy alienates the 
haughty object of his affection, when she is 
on the point of reconcilement. The fever 
of Sforza's diseased heart is powerfully de- 
scribed, passing from the extreme of dotage 
to revenge, and returning again from thence 
to the bitterest repentance and prostration, 
when he has struck at the life which he 
most loved, and has made, when it is too 
late, the discovery of her innocence. Mas- 
singer always enforces this moral in love; — 
he punishes distrust, and attaches our esteem 
to the unbounded confidence of the passion. 
But while Sforza thus exhibits a warning 
against morbidly-selfish sensibility, he is 
made to appear, without violating proba- 
bility, in all other respects a firm, frank, and 
prepossessing character. When his misfor- 
tunes are rendered desperate by the battle 
of Pavia, and when he is brought into the 
presence of Charles V., the inlrepidity with 
which he pleads his cause disarms the re- 
sentment of his conqueror; and the elo- 



ENGLISH POETRY. 177 

quence of the poet makes us expect that it 
should do so. Instead of palliating his zeal 
for the lost cause of Francis, he thus pleads — 

I come not, Emperor, to invade thy mercy 
By fawning on thy fortune, nor bjing with me 
Excuses or denials ; I profess, 
And with a good man's confidence, even this instant 
That I am in thy power, I was thine enemy, 
Thy deadly and vow'd enemy ; one that wished 
Confusion to thy person and estates, 
And with my utmost power, and deepest counsels, 
Had they been truly followed, furthered it. 
Nor will I now, although my neck were under 
The hangman's axe, with one poor syllable 
Confess but that I honour'd the French king 
More than thyself and all men. 

After describing his obligations to Fran- 
cis, he says — 

He was indeed to me as my good angel, 
To guard me from all danger. I dare speak, 
Nay must and wilU his praise now in as high 
And loud a key as when he was thy equal. 
The benefits he sow'd in me met not 
Unthankful ground. * * * 

* * * * If then to be grateful 
For benefits received, or not to leave 
A friend in his necessities, be a crime 



17$ ESSAY ON 

Amongst you Spaniards, Sforza brings his head 
To pay the forfeit. Nor come I as a slave, 
Pinion'd and fetter'd, in a squalid weed, 
Falling before thy feet, kneeling and howling 
For a forestall'd remission— that were poor, 
And would but shame thy victory, for conquest 
Over base foes is a captivity, 
And not a triumph. I ne'er fear'd to die 
More than I wish'd to live. When I had reach'd 
My ends in being a Duke, I wore these robes, 
This crown upon my head, and to my side 
This sword was girt ; and, wituess truth, that now 5 
'Tis in another's power, when I shall part 
With life and them together, I'm the same — 
My veins then did not swell with pride, nor now 
Shrink they for fear. 

If the vehement passions were not Mas- 
singer's happiest element, he expresses fixed 
principle with an air of authority. To 
make us feel the elevation of genuine pride 
was the master-key which he knew how to 
touch in human sympathy ; and his skill in 
it must have been derived from deep expe- 
rience in his own bosom. 

The theatre of Beaumont and Fletcher 
contains all manner of good and evil. The 
respective shares of those dramatic partners, 
in the work3 collectively published with their 



ENGLISH POETRY. 179 

names, have been elesewhere stated. Fletch- 
er's share in them is by far the largest ; and 
he is chargeable with the greatest number of 
faults, although at the same time his genius 
was more airy, prolific, and fanciful. There 
are such extremes of grossness and magnifi- 
cence in their drama, so much sweetness 
and beauty interspersed with views of na- 
ture either falsely romantic, or vulgar be- 
yond reality ; there is so much to animate 
and amuse us, and yet so much that we 
would willingly overlook, that I cannot help 
comparing the contrasted impressions which 
they make, to those which we receive from 
visiting some great and ancient city, pic- 
turesquely but irregularly built, glittering 
with spires and surrounded with gardens, 
but exhibiting in many quarters the lanes 
and hovels of wretchedness. They have 
scenes of wealthy and high life, which re- 
mind us of courts and palaces frequented by 
elegant females and high-spirited gallants, 
whilst their noble old martial characters, 
with Caractacus in the midst of them, may 



180 ESSAY ON 

inspire us with the same sort of regard 
which we pay to the rough-hewn magnifi- 
cence of an ancient fortress. 

Unhappily, the same simile, without being 
hunted down, will apply hut too faithfully 
to the nuisances of their drama. Their lan- 
guage is often basely profligate. Shaks- 
peare'sand Jonson's indelicacies are but casu- 
al blots; whilst theirs are sometimes es- 
sential colours of their painting, and extend, 
in one or two instances, to entire and offen- 
sive scenes. This fault has deservedly in- 
jured their reputation ; and, saving a very 
slight allowance for the fashion and taste of 
their age, admits of no sort of apology .— 
Their drama, nevertheless, is a very wide 
one, and " has ample room and verge enough" 
to permit the attention to wander from these, 
and to fix on more inviting peculiarities — 
as on the great variety of their fables and 
personages, their spirited dialogue, their 
wit, pathos, and humour. Thickly sown 
as their blemishes are, their merit will 
bear great deductions, and still remain great 



ENGLISH POETRY. 181 

We never can forget such beautiful charac- 
ters as their Cellide, their Aspatia and Bel- 
lario, or such humorous ones as their La 
Writ and Cacafogo. Awake they will al- 
ways keep us, whether to quarrel or to be 
pleased with them. Their invention is fruit- 
ful ; its beings are on the whole an active 
and sanguine generation, and their scenes 
are crowded to fulness with the warmth, agi- 
tation, and interest of life. 

In thus speaking of them together, it may 
be necessary to allude to the general and 
traditionary understanding, that Beaumont 
was the graver and more judicious genius of 
the two. Yet the plays in which he may 
be supposed to have assisted Fletcher, are 
by no means remarkable either for harmo- 
nious adjustment of parts, or scrupulous ad- 
herence to probability. In their Laws of 
Candy, the winding up of the plot is accom- 
plished by a young girl commanding a 
whole bench of senators to descend from 
their judgment-seats, in virtue of an an- 
cient law of the state which she discovers; 
and they obey her with the most polite alac- 
16 



182 ESSAY ON 

rity. Cupid's Revenge is assigned to them 
conjointly, and is one of the very weakest 
of their worst class of pieces. On the other 
hand, Fletcher produced his a Rule a Wife 
and have a Wife," after Beaumont's death, 
so that he was able, when he chose, to 
write with skill as well as spirit. 

Of that skill, however, he is often so 
sparing as to leave his characters subject to 
the most whimsical metamorphoses. Some- 
times they repent, like methodists, by in 
stantaneous conversion. At other times 
they shift from good to bad, so as to leave 
us in doubt what they were meant for. In 
the tragedy of Valentinian we have a fine 
old soldier, Maximus, who sustains our af- 
fection through four acts, but in the fifth we 
are suddenly called upon to hate him, on 
being informed, by his own confession, that 
he is very wicked, and that all his past vir- 
tue has been but a trick on our credulity. — 
The imagination, in this case, is disposed to 
take part with the creature of the poet's brain 
against the poet himself, and to think that he 
maltreats and calumniates his own offspring 



ENGLISH POETRY. 183 

unnaturally. 1 But for these faults Fletcher 
makes good atonement, and has many affecting 

1 The most amusingly absurd perhaps of all Fletcher's 
bad plays, is the Island Princess. One might abso- 
lutely take it for a burlesque on the heroic drama, if its 
religious conclusion did not shew the author to be in earn- 
est. Quisara, princess of the islaud of Tidore, where the 
Portuguese have a fort, offers her hand in marriage to any 
champion who shall deliver her brother, a captive of the 
governor of Ternata. Ruy Dias, her Portuguese lover, is 
shy of the adventure j but another lover, Armusia, hires 
a boat, with a few followers, which he hides, on landing 
at Tidore, among the reeds of the invaded island. He 
then disguises himself as a merchant, hires a cellar, like 
the Popish conspirators, and in the most credible manner 
blows up a considerable portion of a large town, rescues 
the king, slaughters all opposers, and re-embarks in his 
yawl from among the reeds. On his return he finds the 
lovely Quisara loth to fulfil her promise, from her being 
still somewhat attached to Ruy Dias. The base Ruy Dias 
sends his nephew, Piniero, to the Islaud Princess, with a 
project of assassinating Armusia ; but Piniero, who is a 
merry fellow, thinks it is better to prevent his uncle's 
crime and to make love for himself. Before his introduce 
tion to the Princess, however, he meets with her aunt Qui- 
sana, to whom he talks abundance of ribaldry and double 
entendre, and so captivates the aged woman, that she ex- 
claims to her attendant, " Pray thee let him talk still, 
for methinks he talks handsomely." — W ith the young 
lady>he is equally successful, offers to murder any body she 



184 ESSAY ON 

scenes. We must still indeed say scenes ; 
for, except in the " Faithful Shepherdess," 
which, unlike bis usual manner, is very lul- 
ling, where shall we find him uniform ? If 
" The Double Marriage" could be cleared 

pleases, and gains her affections so far that she kisses him. 
The poor virtuous Armusia, in the mean time, deter- 
mines to see his false Princess, makes his way to her cham- 
ber, and in spite of her reproaches and her late kiss to Pi- 
niero, at last makes a new impression on her heart. The 
dear Island Princess is in love a third time, in the third act. 
In the fourth act, the king of Tidore, lately delivered by 
Armusia, plots against the Christians ; he is accompanied 
by a Moorish priest, who is no other than the governour 
of Ternata, disguised in a false wig and beard ; but his 
Tidorian majesty recollects his old enemy so imperfectly 
as to be completely deceived. This conspiracy alarms the 
Portuguese ; the cowardly Ruy Dias all at once grows 
brave and generous ; Quisara joins the Christians, and 
for the sake of Armusia and her new faith, offers to be 
burnt alive. Nothing remains but to open the eyes of her 
brother, the king of Tidore. This is accomplished by the 
merry Piniero laying hold of the masqued governor's 
beard, which comes away without the assistance of a bar- 
ber. The monarch exclaims that he cannot speak for as- 
tonishment, and every thing concludes agreeably The 
Island Princess is not unlike some of the romantic dra- 
mas of Dryden's time ; but the later play-writers super- 
added a style of outrageous rant and turgid imagery. 



ENGLISH POETRY. 185 

of some revolting passages, the part of Ju- 
liana would not be unworthy of the powers 
of the finest tragic actress. Juliana is a 
high attempt to pourtray the saint and hero- 
ine blended in female character. When 
her husband Virolet's conspiracy against 
Ferrand of Naples is discovered, she en- 
dures and braves for his sake the most dread- 
ful cruelties of the tyrant. Virolet flies from 
his country, obliged to leave her behind 
him ; and falling at sea into the hands of the 
pirate Duke of Sesse, saves himself and his 
associates from death, by consenting to mar- 
ry the daughter of the pirate (Martia,) who 
falls in love and elopes wiih him from her 
father's ship. As they carry of with them 
the son of Ferrand, who had been a pri- 
soner of the Duke of Sesse, Virolet se- 
cures his peace being made at Naples ; but 
when he has again to meet Juliana, he finds 
that he has purchased life too dearly. When 
the ferocious Martia, seeing his repentance, 
revenges herself by plotting his destruction, 
and when his divorced Juliana, forgetting 
her injuries, flies to warn and to save him, 
16 * 



186 ESSAY ON 

their interview has no common degree of 
interest. Juliana is perhaps rather a fine 
idol of the imagination than a probable type 
of nature ; but poetry, which " accommo- 
dates the shews of things to the desires of the 
mind," 1 has a right to the highest possible 
virtues of human character. And there 
have been women who have prized a hus- 
band's life above their own, and his honour 
above his life, and who have united the ten- 
derness of their sex to heroic intrepidity. — 
Such is Juliana, who thus exhorts the wa- 
vering fortitude of Virolet on the eve of 
his conspiracy. 

Virolet. * * Unless our hands were cannon 
To batter down his walls, our weak breath mines 
To blow his forts up, or our curses lightning, 
Our power is like to yours, and we, like you. 
Weep our misfortunes. * * * * 

She replies — 

* * * Walls of brass resist not 
A noble undertaking— nor can vice 

1 Expression of Lord Bacon's 



ENGLISH POETRY. 187 

Raise any bulwark to make good a place 
Where virtue seeks to enter. 

The joint dramas of Beaumont and 
Fletcher, entitled " Philaster" and the 
" Maid's Tragedy," exhibit other captivat- 
ing female portraits. The difficulty of 
giving at once truth, strength, and delicacy 
to female repentance for the loss of honour, 
is finely accomplished in Evadne. The 
stage has perhaps few scenes more affect- 
ing than that in which she obtains forgive- 
ness of Amintor, on terms which interest us 
in his compassion, without compromising his 
honour. In the same tragedy, 1 the plain- 
tive image of the forsaken Aspatia has an 
indescribably sweet spirit and romantic ex- 
pression. Her fancy takes part with her 
heart, and gives its sorrow a visionary grace- 
fulness. When she finds her maid Anti- 
phila working a picture of Ariadne, she 
tells her to copy the likeness from herself, 
from " the lost Aspatia." 

Asp. But where's the lady ? 

1 The Maid's Tragedy. 



IB8 ESSAY ON 

Ant. There, Madam. 

Asp. Fie, you have miss'd it here, Antiphila; 
These colours are not dull and pale enough, 
To shew a soul so full of misery 
As this sad lady's was. Do it by mc — 
Do it again by me, the lost Aspatia, 
And you shall find all true. Put on the wild island. 
I stand upon the sea-beach now, and think 
Mine arms thus, and my hair blown by the wind 
Wild as that desert, and let all about me 
Be teachers of my story. * * * 
* * * * ' Strive to make me look 
Like Sorrow's monument, and the trees about me, 
Let them be dry and leafless ; let the rocks 
Groan with continual surges, and behind me 
Make all a desolation. See, see, wenches, 
A miserable life of this poor picture. 

The resemblance of this poetical picture 
to Guido's Bacchus and Ariadne has been 
noticed by Mr. Seward in the preface to his 
edition of Beaumont and Fletcher. In both 
representations the extended arms of the 
mourner, her hair blown by the wind, the 
barren roughness of the rocks round her, 
and the broken trunks of leafless trees, make 
her figure appear like Sorrow's monument. 

Their masculine characters in tragedy are 
generally much less interesting than their 



ENGLISH POETRY. 1 89 

females. Some exceptions may be found to 
this remark ; particularly in the British chief 
Caractacus and his interesting nephew, the 
boy Hengo. With all the faults of the tra- 
gedy of Bonduca, its British subject and its 
native heroes attach our hearts. We follow 
Caractacus to battle and captivity with a 
proud satisfaction in his virtue. The stub- 
bornness of the old soldier is finely temper- 
ed by his wise, just, and candid respect for 
his enemies the Romans, and by his tender 
affection for his princely ward. He never 
gives way to sorrow till he looks on the dead 
body of his nephew Hengo, when he thus 
exclaims — 

* * * Farewell the hopes of Britain ! 
Farewell thou royal graft for ever ! Time and Death, 
Ye have done your worst. Fortune, now see, now 

proudly 
Pluck off thy veil, and view thy triumph. 
* * * * O fair flower, 
How lovely yet thy ruins shew— how sweetly 
Ev'n Death embraces thee ! The peace of heaven, 
The fellowship of all great souls, go with thee ! 

The character must be well supported which 
yields a sensation of triumph in the act of 



190 ESSAY ON 

surrendering to victorious enemies. Carac- 
tacus does not need to tell us, that when a 
brave man has done his duty, he cannot be 
humbled by fortune — but he makes us feel 
it in his behaviour. The few brief and sim- 
ple sentences which he utters in submitting 
to the Romans, together with their respect- 
ful behaviour to him, give a sublime com- 
posure to his appearance in the closing 
scene. 

Dryden praises the gentlemen of Beau- 
mont and Fletcher in comedy as the true 
men of fashion of " the times." It was ne- 
cessary that Dryden should call them the 
men of fashion of the times, for they are not 
in the highest sense of the word gentlemen. 
Shirley's comic characters have much more 
of the conversation and polite manners, 
which we should suppose to belong to su- 
perior life in all ages and countries. The 
genteel characters of Fletcher form a nar- 
rower class, and exhibit a more particular 
image of their times and country. But their 
comic personages, after all, are a spirited 
race. In one province of the facetious dra 



ENGLISH POETRY. 191 

ma they set the earliest example ; witness 
their humorous mock-heroic comedy, the 
Knight ol" the burning Pestle, 

The memory of Ford has been deserved- 
ly revived as one of the ornaments of our 
ancient drama; though he has no great 
body of poetry, and has interested us in no 
other passion except that of love; but in 
that he displays a peculiar depth and deli- 
cacy of romantic feeling. Webster has a 
gloomy force of imagination, not unmixed 
with the beautiful and pathetic. But it is 
" beauty in the lap of horror :" he carica- 
tures the shapes of terror, and his Pegasus 
is like a night mare. Middleton, 1 Marston* 
Thos. Hey wood, Decker, and Chapman, 
also present subordinate claims to remem- 
brance in that fertile period of the drama. 

1 Middleton's hags, in the tragi-comedy of the Witch. 
were conjectured by Mr. Steevens to have given the hint 
to Shakspeare of his witches in Macbeth. It has been re- 
peatedly remarked, however, that the resemblance scarce- 
ly extends beyond a few forms of incantation. The hags 
of Middleton are merely mischievous old women, those of 
Shakspeare influence the elements of nature and the des- 
tinies of man. 



192 ESSAY ON 

Shirley was the last of our good old dra- 
matists. When his works shall be given to 
the public, they will undoubtedly enrich our 
popular literature. His language sparkles 
with the most exquisite images. Keeping 
some occasional pruriencies apart, the fault 
of his age rather than of himself, he speaks 
the most polished and refined dialect of the 
stage ; and even some of his over-heightened 
scenes of voluptuousness are meant, though 
with a very mistaken judgment, to inculcate 
morality. 1 I consider his genius, indeed, as 
rather brilliant and elegant than strong or 
lofty. His tragedies are defective in fire, 
grandeur, and passion ; and we must select 
his comedies, to have any favourable idea of 
his humour. His finest poetry comes forth 
in situations rather more familiar than tra- 
gedy and more grave than comedy, which I 
should call sentimental comedy, if the name 
were not associated with ideas of modern in- 

1 The scene in Shirley's Love's Cruelty, for example, 
between Hippolito and the object of his admiration, Act 
IV. Scene i. and another in the Grateful Servant, between 
Belinda and Lodwick. Several more might be mentioned. 



ENGLISH POETRY. 193 

sipidity. That he was capable, however, 
of pure and excellent comedy, will be felt by 
those, who have yet in reserve the amuse- 
ment of reading his Gamester, Hyde-park, 
and Lady of Pleasure. In the first and last 
of these there is a subtle ingenuity in pro- 
ducing comic effect and surprise, which 
might be termed attic, if it did not surpass 
any thing that is left us in Athenian co- 
medy. 

I shail leave to others the more special 
enumeration of his faults, only observing, 
that the airy touches of his expression, the 
delicacy of his sentiments, and the beauty of 
his similes, are often found where the poet 
survives the dramatist, and where he has 
not power to transfuse life and strong indi- 
viduality through the numerous characters 
of his voluminous drama. His style, to use 
a line of his own, is " studded like a frosty 
night with stars;" and a severe critic might 
say, that the stars often shine when the at- 
mosphere is rather too frosty. In other 
words, there is more beauty of fancy than 
strength of feeling in his works. From this 
17 



194 ESSAY ON 

remark, however, a defender of his fame 
might justly appeal to exceptions in many of 
his pieces. From a general impression of 
his works I should not paint his Muse with 
the haughty form and features of inspiration, 
but with a countenance, in its happy mo- 
ments, arch, lovely, and interesting, both in 
smiles and in tears; crowned with flowers, 
and not unindebted to ornament, but wear- 
ing the drapery and chaplei with a claim to 
them from natural beauty. Of his style I 
subjoin one or two more examples, lest I 
may not have done justice to him in that 
respect in the body of the work. 



CLEONA INFORMED BY THE PAGE DULCINO, 
OP FOSCARI, WHOM SHE HAD THOUGHT 
DEAD, BEING STILL ALIVE. 

FROM THE GRATEFUL SERVANT. 

Chona. The day breaks glorious to my darken'd 
thoughts. 
He lives, he lives yet ! cease, ye amorous fears, 
More to perplex me. Prithee speak, sweet youth : 



ENGLISH POETRY. 195 

How fares my lord ? Upon my virgin heart 

I'll build a flaming altar, to offer up 

A thankful sacrifice for his return 

To life and me. Speak, and increase my comforts. 

Is he in perfect health ? 

Dulcino. Not perfect, Madam, 
Until you bless him with the knowledge of 
Your constancy. — 

Cleon. O get thee wings and fly then : 

Tell him my love doth burn like vestal fire, 
Which with his memory, richer than all spices, 
Dispersed odours round about my soul, 
And did refresh it, when 'twas dull and sad, 

With thinking of his absence 

Vet stay, 

Thou goest away too soon ; where is he ? speak. 

Did. He gave me no commission for that, lady ; 
He will soon save that question by his presence. 

Cleon. Time has no feathers — he walks now on 
crutches. — 
Relate his gestures when he gave thee this. 
What other words? — Did mirth smile on his brow? 
1 would not, for the wealth of this great world, 
He should suspect my faith. What said he, prithee? 

Dul. He said what a warm lover, when desire 
Makes eloquent, could speak-— he said you were 
Both star and pilot. 

Cleon. The sun's lov'd flower, that shuts his yellow 
curtain 
When he declineth, opens it again 
At his fair rising : with my parting lord 



196 ESSAY ON 

I clos'd all my delight—till his approach 
It shall not spread itself. 



FOSCARl, IN HIS MELANCHOLY, ANNOUNCING 
TO FATHER VALENTIO HIS RESOLUTION 
TO BECOME A MONK. 

FROM THE SAME. 

Foscari. There is a sun ten times more glorious 
Than that which rises in the east, attracts me 
To feed upon his sweet beams, and become 
A bird of Paradise, a religious man, 
To rise from earth, and no more to turn back 
But for a burial. 

Valentio. My lord, the truth is, like your coat of arms, 
Richest when plainest. I do fear the world 
Hath tired you, and you seek a cell to rest in ; 
As birds that wing it o'er the sea, seek ships 
Till they get breath, and then they fly away. 



THE DUKE OF FLORENCE TO HIS MURDERER, 
LORENZO. 

FROM THE TRAITOR. 

* * * For thee, inhuman murderer, expect 
My blood shall fly to Heaven, and there enflamed, 
Hang a prodigious meteor all thy life : 



ENGLISH POETRY. 197 

And when, by some as bloody hand as thine, 

Thy soul is ebbing forth, it shall descend, 

In flaming drops, upon thee. O ! I faint ! 

Thou flattering world, farewell. Let princes gather 

My dust into a glass, and learn to spend 

Their hour of state — that's all they have — for when 

That's out, Time never turns the glass again. 



FROM THE SAME. 

* * When our souls shall leave this dwelling. 
The glory of one fair and virtuous action 
Is above all the scutcheons on our tomb, 
Or silken banners over us. 



FERNANDO DESCRIBING HIS MISTRESS TO 
FKANC1SCO. 

FROM THE COMEi>\ OF THE BROTHERS. 

Fern. You have, then, a mistress, 

And thrive upon her favours but thou arl 

My brother: Til deliver thee a secret ; 
I was at St. Sebastiau's, last Sunday, 
At vespers. 

Fran. Is it a secret that you went to church !' 
You need not blush to tell 't your ghostly father, 
17 * 



198 ESSAY ON 

Fern. I prithee leave thy impertinence : there I saw- 
So sweet a face, so harmless, so intent 
Upon her prayers j it frosted my devotion 
To gaze upon her. till by degrees 1 took 
Her fair idea, through my covetous eyes, 
Into my heart, and know not how to ease 
It since of the impression. 

Her eye did seem to labour with a tear, 
Which suddenly took birth, but, overweighM 
With its own swelling, dropp'd upon her bosom, 
Which, by reflection of her light, appearM 
As Nature meant her sorrow for an ornament. 
After, her looks grew cheerful, and I saw 
A smile shoot graceful upward from her eyes, 
As if they had gained a victory o'er grief j 
And with it many beams twisted themselves- 
Upon whose golden threads the angels walk 
To and again from heaven. 

The contempt which Dryden expresses 
for Shirley might surprise us, if it were not 
recollected that he lived in a degenerate 
age of dramatic taste, and that his critical 
sentences were neither infallible nor immu- 
table. He at one time undervalued Otway, 
though he lived to alter his opinion. 

The civil wars put an end to this dynasty 
of our dramatic poets. Their immediate 



ENGLISH POETRY. 199 

successors or contemporaries belonging to the 
reign of Charles I., many of whom resumed 
their lyres after the interregnum, may, in a 
general view, be divided into the classical and 
metaphysical schools. The former class, con- 
taining Denham, Waller, and Carew, upon 
the whole, cultivated smooth and distinct 
melody of numbers, correctness of imagery, 
and polished elegance of expression. The 
latter, in which Herrick and Cowley stood at 
the head of Donne's metaphysical followers, 
were generally loose or rugged in their ver- 
sification, and preposterous in their meta- 
phors. But this distinction can only be 
drawn in very general terms ; for Cowley, 
the prince of the metaphysicians, has bursts 
of natural feeling and just thoughts in the 
midst of his absurdities. And Herrick, who 
is equally whimsical, has left some little 
gems of highly-finished composition. On 
the other hand, the correct Waller is some- 
times metaphysical ; and ridiculous hyper- 
boles are to be found in the elegant style of 
Carew. 



200 ESSAY ON 

The characters of Denham, Waller, and 
Cowley, have been often described. Had 
Cowley written nothing but his prose, it 
would have stamped him a man of genius, 
and an improver of our language. Of his 
poetry Rochester indecorously said, that 
" not being of God, it could not stand/' 
Had the word nature been substituted, it 
would have equally conveyed the intended 
meaning, but still that meaning would not 
have been strictly just. There is much in 
Cowley that will stand. He teems, in many 
places, with the imagery, the feeling, the 
grace and gaiety of a poet. Nothing but a 
severer judgment was wanting to collect the 
scattered lights of his fancy. His unnatural 
flights arose less from affectation than self- 
deception. He cherished false thoughts as 
men often associate with false friends, not 
from insensibility to the difference between 
truth and falsehood, but from being too indo- 
lent to examine the difference. Herrick, 
if we were to fix our eyes on a small por- 
tion of his works, might be prouounced a 
writer of delightful Anacreontic spirit. He 



ENGLISH POETRY. 201 

has passages where the thoughts seem to 
dance into numbers from his very heart, and 
where he frolics like a being made up of me- 
lody and pleasure ; as when he sings- 
Gather the rose-buds while ye may, 

Old Time is still a-flying j 
And that same flower that blooms to-day, 
To-morrow shall be dying. 

In the same spirit are his verses to Anthaea, 
concluding — 

Thou art my life, my love, my heart, 

The very eyes of me ; 
And hast command of every part, 

To live and die for thee. 

But his beauties are so deeply involved in 
surrounding coarseness and extravagance, as 
to constitute not a tenth part of his poetry, 
or rather it may be safely affirmed, that of 
1400 pages of verse, which he has left, not 
an hundred are worth reading. 

In Milton there may be traced obligations 
to several minor English poets ; but his 
genius had too great a supremacy to belong 



i20'J ESSAY ON 

to any school. Though he acknowledged a 
filial reverence for Spenser as a poet, he 
left no Gothic irregular tracery in the design 
of his own great work, hut gave a classical 
harmony of parts to its stupendous pile. It 
thus resembles a dome, the vastness of 
which is at first sight concealed hy its sym- 
metry, hut which expands more and more to 
the eye while it is contemplated. His early 
poetry seems to have neither disturbed nor 
corrected the had taste of his age. Comus 
came into the world unacknowledged by its 
author, and Lycidas appeared at first only 
with his initials. These, and other exqui- 
site pieces, composed in the happiest years 
of his life, at his father's country-house at 
Hortou, were collectively published, with 
his name affixed to them, in 1645; but that 
precious volume, which included L' Allegro 
and 11 Penseroso, did not (I believe) come 
to a second edition, till it was republished 
by himself at the distance of eight and 
twenty years. Almost a century elapsed 
before his minor works obtained their proper 
fame. Handel's music is said, by Dr. War- 



ENGLISH POETRY. 203 

ton, to have drawn the first attention to 
them; but they must have been admired 
before Handel set them to music; for he was 
assuredly not the first todiscover their beauty. 
But of Milton's poetry being above the com- 
prehension of his age, we should have a suffi- 
cient proof, if we had no other, in the grave 
remark of Lord Clarendon, that Cowley had, 
in his time, "taken a flight above all men in 
poetry" Even when Paradise Lost appear- 
ed, though it was not neglected, it attracted 
no crowd of imitators, and made no visible 
change in the poetical practice of the age. 
He stood alone, and aloof above his times, 
the bard of immortal subjects, and, as far as 
there is perpetuity in ianguage, of immortal 
fame. The very choice of those subjects 
bespoke a contempt for anj' species of e» 
cellence that was attainable by other men. 
There is something that overawes the mind 
in conceiving his long deliberated selection 
of that theme — his attempting it when his 
eyes were shut upon the face of nature — 
his dependence, we might almost say, on 
supernatural inspiration, and in the calm air 



204 ESSAY ON 

of strength with which he open Paradise Lost, 
beginning a mighty performance without the 
appearance of an effort. Taking the sub- 
ject all in all, his powers could nowhere else 
have enjoyed the same scope. It was only 
from the height of this great argument that 
he could look back upon eternity past, and 
forward upon eternity to come, that he could 
survey the abyss of infernal darkness, open 
visions of Paradise, or ascend to heaven and 
breathe empyreal air. Still the subject had 
precipitous difficulties. It obliged him to 
relinquish the warm, multifarious interests of 
human life. For these indeed lie could sub- 
stitute holier things; but a more insupera- 
ble objection to the theme was, that it in- 
volved the representation of a war between 
the Almighty and his created beings. To 
the vicissitudes of such a warfare it was im- 
possible to make us attach the same fluctua- 
tions of hope and fear, the same curiosity, 
suspense, and sympathy, which we feel 
amidst the battles of the Iliad, and which 
make every brave young spirit long to be in 
the midst of them. 



ENGLISH POETRY. 205 

Milton has certainly triumphed over one 
difficulty of his subject, the paucity and 
the loneliness of its human agents ; for no 
one in contemplating the garden of Eden 
would wish to exchange it for a more popu- 
lous world. His earthly pair could only be 
represented, during their innocence, as be- 
ings of simple enjoyment and negative vir- 
tue, with no other passions than the fear of 
heaven, and the love of each other. Yet 
from these materials what a picture has he 
drawn of their homage to the Deity, their 
mutual affection, and the horrors of their 
alienation ! By concentrating all exquisite 
ideas of external nature in the representation 
of their abode — by conveying an inspired 
impression of their spirits and forms, whilst 
they first shone under the fresh light of crea- 
tive heaven— by these powers of description, 
he links our first parents, in harmonious subor- 
dination, to the angelic natures — he supports 
them in the balance of poetical importance 
with their divine coadjutors and enemies, 
and makes them appear at once worthy of 
the friendship and envy of gods. 
18 



206 ESSAY ON 

In (he angelic warfare of the poem, Milton 
bv.s done whatever human genius could ac- 
complish. But, although Satan speaks of 
having " put to proof his (Maker's) high 
supremacy, in dubious; battle, on the plains 
of heaven," the expression, though finely 
characteristic of his blasphemous pride, does 
not prevent us from feeling that the battle 
cannot for a moment be dubious. Whilst 
the powers of description and language are 
taxed and exhausted to pouriray the combat, 
it is impossible not to feel with regard to the 
blessed spirits, a profound and reposing secu- 
rity that they have neither great dangers to 
fear, nor reverses to suffer. At the same 
time it must be said, that, although in the 
actual contact of the armies the inequality 
of the strife becomes strongly visible to the 
imagination, and makes it a contest more of 
noise than terror ; yet while positive ac- 
tion is suspended, there is a warlike gran- 
deur in the poem, which is nowhere to be 
paralleled. When Milton's genius dares to 
invest the Almighty himself with arms, 
11 his bow and thunder," the astonished mind 



ENGLISH POETRY. 20? 

admits the image with a momentary cre- 
dence. It is otherwise when we are in- 
volved in the circnmst ntial details of the 
campaign. We have then leisure to antici- 
pate its only possible issue, and can feel no 
alarm for any temporary check that may be 
given to those who fight under the banners 
of Omnipotence. The warlike part of Para- 
dise Lost was inseparable from ils subject. 
Whether it could have been differently 
managed, is a problem which our reverence 
for Milton will scarcely permit U3 to state. 
I feel that reverence too strongly to suggest 
even the possibility that Milton could have 
improved his poem, by having thrown his 
angelic warfare into more remote perspec- 
tive ; but it seems to me to be most sublime, 
when it is least distinctly brought home to 
the imagination. What an awful effect has 
the dim and undefined conception of the 
conflict, which we gafher from the opening 
of the first book ! There the veil of mystery 
is left undrawn between us and a subject, 
which the powers of description were inade- 
quate to exhibit. The ministers of divine 



208 ESSAY ON 

vengeance and pursuit had been recalled — 
the thunders had ceased 

" To bellow through the vast and boundless deep, 1 * 

(in that line what an image of sound and 
space is conveyed !) — and our terrific con- 
ception of the past is deepened by its indis- 
tinctness. In optics there are some pheno- 
mena which are beautifully deceptive at a 
certain distance, but which lose their illusive 
charm on the slightest approach to them, 
that changes the light and position in which 
they are viewed. Something like this takes 
place in the phenomena of fancy. The 
array of the fallen angels in hell — the un- 
furling of the standard of Satan — and the 
march of his troops 



" In perfect phalanx, to the Dorian mood 
Of flutes and soft recorders" — 



all this human pomp and circumstance of 
war — is magic and overwhelming illusion. 
The imagination is taken by surprise. But 



ENGLISH POETRY. 209 

the noblest efforts of language are tried with 
very unequal effect to interest us, in the 
immediate and close view of the battle itself 
in the sixth book; and the martial demons, 
who charmed us in the shades of hell, lose 
some portion of their sublimity, when their 
artillery is discharged in the day-light of 
heaven. 

If we call diction the garb of thought, 
Milton, in his style, may be said to wear 
the costume of sovereignty. The idioms 
even of foreign languages contributed to 
adorn it. He was the most learned of poets ; 
yet his learning interferes not with his sub- 
stantial English purity. His simplicity is 
unimpaired by glowing ornament, like the 
bush in the sacred flame, which burnt but 
" was not consumed." 

In delineating the blessed spirits, Milton 
has exhausted all the conceivable variety 
that could be given to pictures of unshaded 
sanctity; but it is chiefly in those of the 
fallen angels that his excellence is conspi- 
cuous above every thing ancient or modern. 
Tasso had, indeed, pourtrayed an infernal 
18 * 



210 ESSAY ON 

council, and had given the hint to our poet 
of ascribing the origin of pagan worship to 
those reprobate spirits. But how poor and 
squalid in comparison of the Miltonic Pan- 
daemonium are the Scyllas, the Cyclopses, 
and the Chimeras of the Infernal Council of 
the Jerusalem ! Tasso's conclave of fiends is 
a den of ugly incongruous monsters. 

O come strane, o come orribii forme ! 

Quant e negli occhi lor terror, e morte ! 

Stampano alcuni il suol di ferine orme 

E'n fronte umana han chiome d' angui attorte 

E lor s'aggira dietro immensa loda 

Che quasi sferza si ripiega, e snoda. 

Qui mille immonde Arpie vedresti, e mille 

Centauri, e Sfingi, e pallide Gorgoni, 

Molte e molte latrar voraci Settle 

E fischiar Idre, e sibilar Pitoni, 

E vomitar Chimere atre faville 

E Folifemi orrendi, e Gerioni. 

5fC *f» -ji rj£ r*f ifC wfi 

La Gerusalemme, Canto IV. 

The powers of Milton's hell are godlike 
shapes and forms. Their appearance dwarfs 
every other poetical conception, when we 
turn our dilated eyes from contemplating 



ENGLISH POETRY. 211 

them. It is not their external attributes 
alone which expand the imagination, but 
their souls, which are as colossal as their 
stature — their "thoughts that wander through 
eternity" — the pride that burns amidst the 
ruins of their divine natures, and their ge- 
nius, that feels with the ardour, and debates 
with the eloquence of heaven. 

The subject of Paradise Lost was the 
origin of evil — an era in existence-— an event 
more than all others dividing past from 
future time — an isthmus in the ocean of 
eternity. The theme was in its nature con- 
nected with every thing important in the 
circumstances of human history ; and amidst 
these circumstances Milton saw that the 
fables of Paganism were too important and 
poetical to be omitted. As a Christian, he 
was entitled wholly to neglect them; but as 
a poet, he chose to treat them, not as dreams 
of the human mind, but as the delusions of 
infernal existences. Thus anticipating a 
beautiful propriety for all classical allusions, 
thus connecting and reconciling the co- 
existence of fable and of truth, and thus 



212 ESSAY OIV 

identifying the fallen angels with the deities 
of " gay religions, full of pomp and gold," 
he yoked the heathen mythology in triumph 
to his subject, and clothed himself in the 
spoils of superstition. 

One eminent production of wit, namely, 
Hudibras, may be said to have sprung out of 
the Restoration, or at least out of the con- 
tempt of fanaticism, which had its triumph 
in that event ; otherwise, the return of roy- 
alty contributed as little to improve the taste 
as the morality of the public. The drama 
degenerated, owing, as we are generally 
told, to the influence of French literature 
although some infection from the Spanish 
stage might also be taken into the account. 
Sir William Davenant, who presided over 
the first revival of the theatre, was a man of 
cold and didactic spirit ; he created an era 
in the machinery, costume, and ornaments of 
the stage, but he was only fitted to be its 
mechanical benefactor. Dryden, who could 
do even bad things with a good grace, con- 
firmed the taste for rhyming and ranting 
tragedy. Two beautiful plays of Olway 



ENGLISH POETRY. 213 

formed an exception to this degeneracy; 
but Otway was cut off in the spring-tide of 
his genius, and his early death was, accord- 
ing to every appearance, a heavy loss to our 
drama. It has been alleged, indeed, in the 
present day, that Otway's imagination shew- 
ed no prognostics of great future achieve- 
ments; but when I remember Venice Pre- 
served and the Orphan as the works of a man 
of thirty, I can treat this opinion no other- 
wise than to dismiss it as an idle assertion. 

BctffK i$t, whi Ou/gf. 

During the last thirty years of the seven- 
teenth century, Dryden was seldom long 
absent from the view of the public, and he 
alternately swayed and humoured its predi- 
lections. Whatever may be said of his ac- 
commodating and fluctuating theories of cri- 
ticism, his perseverance in training and dis- 
ciplining his own faculties is entitled to 
much admiration. He strengthened his mind 
by action, and fertilized it by production. 
In his old age he renewed his youth, like 



214 ESSAY ON 

the eagle; or rather his genius acquired 
stronger wings than it had ever spread. He 
rose and fell, it is true, in the course of his 
poetical career; but upon the whole it was 
a career of improvement to the very last. 
Even in the drama, which was not his natur- 
al province, his good sense came at last so 
far in aid of his deficient sensibility, that he 
gave up his system of rhyming tragedy, and 
adopted Shakspeare (in theory at least) for 
his model. In poetry not belonging to the 
drama, he was at first an admirer of Cowley, 
then of Davenant; and ultimately he ac- 
quired a manner above' the peculiarities of 
either. The odes and fables of his latest 
volume surpass whatever he had formerly 
written. He was satirized and abused as 
well as extolled by his contemporaries; but 
his genius was neither to be discouraged by 
the severity, nor spoilt by the favour of cri- 
ticism. It flourished alike id the sunshine 
and the storm, and its fruits improved as 
they multiplied in profusion. When we 
view him out of the walk of purely original 
composition, it is not a paradox to say, that 



ENGLISH POETRY. 215 

though he is one of the greatest artists in 
language, and perhaps the greatest of English 
translators, he nevertheless attempted one 
task in which his failure is at least as con- 
spicuous as his success. But that task was 
the translation of Virgil. And it is not 
lenity, but absolute justice, that requires us 
to make a very large and liberal allowance, 
for whatever deficiencies he may shew in 
transfusing into a language less harmonious 
and flexible than the Latin, the sense of 
that poet, who, in the history of the world, 
has had no rival in beauty of expression. 
Dryden renovates Chaucer's thoughts, and 
fills up Boccaccio's narrative outline with 
many improving touches : and though par- 
aphrase suited his free spirit better than 
translation, yet even in versions of Horace 
and Juvenal he seizes the classical character 
»f Latin poetry with a boldness and dex- 
terity which are all his own. But it was 
easier for him to emulate the strength of 
Juvenal than the serene majesty of Virgil. 
His translation of Virgil is certainly an in- 
adequate representation of the Roman poet. 



216 ESSAY ON 

It is often bold and graceful, and generally 
idiomatic and easy. But though the spirit 
of the original is not lost, it is sadly and un- 
equally diffused. Nor is it only in the magic 
of words, in the exquisite structure and rich 
economy of expression, that Dryden (as we 
might expect) falls beneath Virgil, but we 
too often feel the inequality of his vital sen- 
sibility as a poet. Too frequently, when 
the Roman classic touches the heart, or era- 
bodies to our fancy those noble images to 
which nothing could be added, and from 
which nothing can be taken away, we are 
sensible of the distance between Dryden's 
talent, and Virgil's inspiration. One pas- 
sage out of many, the representation of Ju- 
piter in the first book of the Georgics, may 
shew this difference. 



GEORGICS, LIB. I. L. 328. 

Ipse Pater, media nimborum in nocte, corusca 
Fulmina molitur dextra : quo maxima motu 
Terra tremit, fugere ferae, et mortalia corda 
Per gentes humilis stravit pavor 



ENGLISH POETRY. 217 

The father of the Gods his glory shrouds, 
Involved in tempests and a night of clouds, 
And from the middle darkness flashing out, 
By fits he deals his fiery bolts about. 
Earth feels the motion of her angry God, 
Her entrails tremble, and her mountains nod, 
And flying beasts in forests seek abode : 
Deep horror seizes every human breast, 
Their pride is humbled, and their fear confessed. 

Virgil's three lines and a half might chal- 
lenge the most sublime pencil of Italy to 
the same subject. His words are no sooner 
read than, with the rapidity of light, they 
collect a picture before the mind which 
stands confessed in all its parts. There is 
no interval between the objects as they are 
presented to our perception. At one and 
the same moment, we behold the form, the 
uplifted arm, and dazzling thunderbolts of 
Jove, amidst a night of clouds; — the earth 
trembling, and the wild beasts scudding for 
shelter—- -fugere— they have vanished while 
the poet describes them, and we feel that 
mortal hearts are laid prostrate with fear, 
throughout the nations. Dryden, in the 
19 



218 ESSAY ON 

translation, has done his best, and some of 
his lines roll on with spirit and dignity, but 
the whole description is a process rather 

than a picture the instantaneous effect, 

the electric unity of the original, is lost. 
Jupiter has leisure to deal out his fiery bolts 
by fits, while the entrails of the earth shake, 
and her mountains nod, and the flying beasts 
have time to look out very quietly for lodg- 
ings in the forest. The weakness of the two 
last lines, which stand for the weighty words, 
"Mortalia cor da per gentes humilis stravit 
pavor" need not be pointed out. 

I cannot quote this passage without recur- 
ring to the recollection, already suggested, 
that it was Virgil with whom the English 
translator had to contend. Dryden's admi- 
rers might undoubtedly quote many pas* 
sages much more in his favour; and one 
passage occurs to me as a striking example 
of his felicity. In the following lines (with 
the exception of one) we recognize a great 
poet, and can scarcely acknowledge that he 
is translating a greater. 



ENGLISH POETRY. 219 



JENEID, LIB. XII. L. 331. 

Q,ualis apud gelidi cum flumina concitus Hebri 
Sanguineus Mavors clipeo intonat 1 atque furentes 
Bella movens iminittit equos, illi aequore aperto 
Ante Notos Zephyrumque volant, gemit ultima pulsu 
Thraca pedum, circumque atrae Formidinis ora, 
Ira, insidiaeque, Dei comitatus aguntur 

Thus, on the banks of Hebrus' freezing flood, 
The god of battles, in his angry mood, 
Clashing his sword against his brazen shield, 
Lets loose the reins, and scours along the field : 
Before the wind his fiery coursers fly, 
Groans the sad earth, resounds the rattling sky ; 
Wrath, terror, treason, tumult and despair, 
Dire faces and deformed, surround the car, 
Friends of the God, and followers of the war. 

If it were asked how far Dryden can 
strictly be called an inventive poet, his 
drama certainly would not furnish many 
instances of characters strongly designed ; 
though his Spanish Friar is by no means an 
insipid personage in comedy. The contri- 

1 Intonat — I follow Wakefield's edition of Virgil in 
preference toothers which have " increpat^ 



220 ESSAY ON 

vance in the Hind and Panther of beasts 
disputing about religion, if it were his own, 
would do little honour to his ingenuity. The 
idea, in Absalom and Achitophel, of couch- 
ing modern characters under scripture names, 
was adopted from one of the Puritan writers ; 
yet there is so much ingenuity evinced in 
supporting the parallel, and so admirable a 
gallery of portraits displayed in the work, as 
to render that circumstance insignificant 
with regard to its originality. Nor, though 
his fables are borrowed, can we regard him 
with much less esteem than if he had been 
their inventor. He is a writer of manly and 
elastic character. His strong judgment gave 
force as well as direction to a flexible fancy; 
and his harmony is generally the echo of 
solid thoughts. But he was not gifted with 
intense or lofty sensibility ; on the contrary, 
the grosser any idea is, the happier he seems 
to expatiate upon it. The transports of the 
heart, and the deep and varied delineations 
of the passions, are strangers to his poetry. 
He could describe character in the abstract, 
but could not embody it in the drama, for 



ENGLISH POETRY. 221 

he entered into character more from clear 
perception than fervid sympathy. This 
great High Priest of all the Nine was not a 
confessor to the finer secrets of the human 
breast. Had the subject of Eloisa fallen into 
his hands, he would have left but a coarse 
draught of her passion. 

Dryden died in the last year of the se- 
venteenth century. In the intervening peri- 
od between his death and the meridian of 
Pope's reputation, we may be kept in good 
humour with the archness of Prior, and the 
wit of Swift. Parnell was the most elegant 
rhymist of Pope's early contemporaries ; and 
Rowe, if he did not bring back the full fire 
of the drama, at least preserved its vestal 
spark from being wholly extinguished. — 
There are exclusionists in taste, who think 
that they cannot speak with sufficient dis- 
paragement of the English poets of the first 
part of the eighteenth century ; and they 
are armed with a noble provocative to Eng- 
lish contempt, when they have it to say, 
that those poets belong to a French school. 
Indeed Dryden himself is generally includ- 
19 * 



222 ESSAY ON 

ed in that school ; though more genuine 
English is to be found in no man's pages. 
But in poetry there are many mansions." 
I am free to confess, that I can pass from 
the elder writers, and still find a charm in 
the correct and equable sweetness of Par- 
nell. Conscious that his diction has not the 
freedom and volubility of the better strains 
of the elder time, I cannot but remark his 
exemption from the quaintness and false 
metaphor which so often disfigure the 
style of the preceding age; nor deny my 
respect to the select choice of his expres- 
sion, the clearness and keeping of his ima- 
gery, and the pensive dignity of his moral 
feeling. 

Pope gave our heroic couplet its strictest 
melody and tersest expression. 

D\m mot mis en sa place il enseigne le pouvoir. 

If his contemporaries forgot other poets in 
admiring him, let him not be robbed of his 
just fame on pretence that a part of it was 
superfluous. The public ear was long fa- 
tigued with repetitions of his manner; but 



ENGLISH POETRY. 223 

if we place ourselves in the situation of 
those to whom his brilliancy, succinctness, 
and animation were wholly new, we cannot 
wonder at their being captivated to the 
fondest admiration. In order to do justice 
to Pope, we should forget his imitators, if 
that were possible ; but it is easier to remem- 
ber than to forget by an effort — to acquire 
associations than to shake them off. Every 
one may recollect how often the most beau- 
tiful air has palled upon his ear, and grown 
insipid, from being played or sung by vulgar 
musicians. It is the same thing with regard 
to Pope's versification. That his peculiar 
rhythm and manner are the very best in the 
whole range of our poetry, need not be as- 
serted. He has a gracefully peculiar man- 
ner, though it is not calculated to be an uni- 
versal one ; and where, indeed, shall we 
find the style of poetry that could be pro- 
nounced an exclusive model for every com- 
poser ? His pauses have little variety, and 
his phrases are too much weighed in the 
balance of antithesis. But let us look to the 
spirit that points his antithesis, and to the 



224 ESSAY OIV 

rapid precision of his thoughts, and we shall 
forgive him for being too antithetic and sen* 
tentious. 

Pope's works have been twice given to 
the world by editors who cannot be taxed 
with the slightest editorial partiality towards 
his fame. The last of these is the Rev. 
Mr. Bowles, in speaking of whom I beg 
leave most distinctly to disclaim the slight- 
est intention of undervaluing his acknow- 
ledged merit as a poet, however freely and 
fully I may dissent from his critical esti- 
mate of the genius of Pope. Mr. Bowles, 
in forming this estimate, lays great stress 
upon the argument, that Pope's images are 
drawn from art more than from nature. — 
That Pope was neither so insensible to the 
beauties of nature, nor so indistinct in de- 
scribing them, as to forfeit the character of a 
genuine poet, is what I mean to urge, with- 
out exaggerating his picturesqueness. But 
before speaking of that quality in his wri- 
tings,! would beg leave to observe, in the 
first place, that the faculty by which a poet 
luminously describes objects of art, is essen- 



ENGLISH POETRY. 225 

tially the same faculty / which enables him 
to be a faithful describer of simple nature; in 
the second place, that nature and art are to 
a greater degree relative terms in poetical 
description than is generally recollected ; 
and, thirdly, that artificial objects and man- 
ners are of so much importance in fiction, as 
to make the exquisite description of them 
no less characteristic of genius, than the de- 
scription of simple physical appearances. — 
The poet is " creation's heir." He deepens 
our social interest in existence. It is sure- 
ly by the liveliness of the interest which he 
excites in existence, and not by the class 
of subjects which he chooses, that we 
most fairly appreciate the genius or the life 
which is in him. It is no irreverence to 
the external charms of nature to say, that 
they are not more important to a poet's study, 
than the manners and affections of his spe- 
cies. Nature is the poet's goddess ; but by 
nature, no one rightly understands her 
mere inanimate face — however charming it 
may be — or the simple landscape painting 
of trees, clouds, precipices, and flowers.— 



226 ESSAY ON 

Why then try Pope, or any other poet, ex- 
clusively by his powers of describing inani- 
mate phenomena ? Nature, in the wide and 
proper sense of the word, means life in all 
its circumstances — nature moral as well as 
external. As the subject of inspired fic- 
tion, nature includes artificial forms and 
manners. Richardson is no less a painter 
of nature than Homer. Homer himself is a 
minute describer of works of art ; and Mil- 
ton is full of imagery derived from it. Sa- 
tan's spear is compared to the pine that 
makes " the mast of some " great ammiral,' 
and his shield is like the moon, but like 
the moon artificially seen through the glass 
of the Tuscan artist. The " spirit-stirring 
drum, the ear-piercing fife, the royal ban- 
ner, and all quality, pride, pomp, and cir- 
cumstance of glorious war,' ? are all artificial 
images. When Shakspeare groups into one 
view the most sublime objects of the uni- 
verse, he fixes first on " the cloud-capt tow- 
ers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn tem- 
ples." Those who have ever witnessed the 
spectacle of the launching of a ship of the 



ENGLISH POETRY. 227 

line, will perhaps forgive me for adding this 
to the examples of the sublime objects of ar- 
tificial life. Of that spectacle I can never 
forget the impression, and of having witness- 
ed it reflected from the faces of ten thousand 
spectators. They seem yet before me — I 
sympathise with their deep and silent expec- 
tation, and with their final burst of enthu- 
siasm. It was not a vulgar joy, but an af- 
fecting national solemnity. When the vast 
bulwark sprang from her cradle, the calm 
water on which she swung majestically round, 
gave the imagination a contrast of the stormy 
element on which she was soon to ride.— 
All the days of battle and the nights of dan- 
ger which she had to encounter, all the ends 
of the earth which she had to visit, and all 
that she had to do and to suffer for her coun- 
try, rose in awful presentiment before the 
mind; and when the heart gave her a bene- 
diction, it was like one pronounced on a liv- 
ing being. 

Pope, while he is a great moral writer, 

though not elaborately picturesque, is by no 

Cleans deficient as a painter of interesting 



228 ESSAY ON 

external objects. No one will say that he 
peruses Eloisa's Epistle without a solemn 
impression of the pomp of catholic super- 
stition. In familiar description, nothing 
can be more distinct and agreeable than his 
lines on the Man of Ross, when he asks, 

Whose causeway parts the vale with shady rows ? 
Whose seats the weary traveller repose ? 
Who taught that heav'n-directed spire to rise? 
The Man of Ross ; each lisping babe replies. 
Behold the market-place with poor overspread — 
The Man of Ross divides the weekly bread : 
He feeds yon alms-house, neat, but void of state, 
Where Age and Want sit smiling at the gate: 
Him portion'd maids, apprenticed orphans blest, 
The young who labour, and the old who rest. 

Nor 13 he without observations of animal 
nature, in which every epithet is a decisive 

touch, as, 

From the green myriads in the peopled grass, 
What modes of sight betwixt each wide extreme, 
The mole's dim curtain, and the lynx's beam j 
Of smell, the headlong lioness between 
And hound sagacious on the tainted green j 
Of hearing, from the life that fills the flood, 
% To that which warbles through the vernal wood ; _ 

The spider's touch how exquisitely fine, 
Feels at each thread, and lives along the line. 



ENGLISH POETRY. 229 

Hi3 picture of the dying pheasant is in 
every one's memory, and possibly the lines 
of his winter piece may by this time have 
crossed the recollection of some of our brave 
adventurers in the polar enterprise. 

So Zembla's rocks, the beauteous work of frost, 
Kise white in air, and glitter o'er the coast j 
Pale suns, unfelt at distance, roll away, 
And on the impassive ice the lightnings play j 
Eternal snows the growing mass supply, 
Till the bright mountains prop th' incumbent sky j 
As Atlas fix'd, each hoary pile appears, 
The gathered winter of a thousand years. 

I am well aware that neither these nor 
similar instances will come up to Mr. 
Bowles's idea of that talent for the pictur- 
esque which he deems essential to poetry.— 
" The true poet," says that writer, " should 
have an eye attentive to and familiar with 
every change of season, every variation of 
light and shade of nature, every rock, every 
tree, and every leaf in her secret places. — 
He who has not an eye to observe these, 
and who cannot with a glance distinguish 
every hue in her variety, must be so far de- 
20 



230 ESSAY ON 

ficient in one of the essential qualities of a 
poet." Every rock, every leaf, every diver- 
sity of hue in nature's variety ! Assuredly 
this botanizing perspicacity might be essen- 
tial to a Dutch flower painter; but Sopho- 
cles displays no such skill, and yet he is a 
genuine, a great, and affecting poet Even 
in describing the desert island of Philoc- 
tetes, there is no minute observation of na- 
ture's hues in secret places. Throughout 
the Greek tragedians there is nothing to 
shew them more attentive observers of in- 
animate objects than other men. Pope's 
discrimination lay in the lights and shades 
of human manners, which are at least as in- 
teresting as those of rocks and leaves. In 
moral eloquence he is for ever densus et in- 
stans sibu The mind of a poet employed 
in concentrating such lines as these descrip- 
tive of creative power, which 

" Builds life on death, on change duration founds, 
" And bids th? eternal wheels to know their rounds," 

might well be excused for not descending 
to the minutely picturesque. The vindic- 



ENGLISH POETRY. 231 

tive personality of his satire is a fault of the 
man, and not of the poet. But his wit is 
not all his charm. He glows with passion 
in the Epistle of Eloisa, and displays a lofty 
feeling much above that of the satirist and 
the man of the world, in his prologue to 
Cato, and his Epistle to Lord Oxford. I 
know not how to designate the possessor of 
such gifts but by the name of a genuine 
poet — 

qualem vix repperit unum 

MiHibus in multis hominum consultus Apollo. 

Ausonius. 

Of the poets in succession to Pope I have 
spoken in their respective biographies. 



THE END. 



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